The crisis, like most of the other crisis' we are seeing right now, is housing costs.
People don't want to work for BC ferries(or in healthcare, or many other occupations) at the current wages because they can't afford to live on them due to high housing costs.
We could fix that by paying more or we could fix it by reducing housing costs. The first one is simpler, but doesn't fix the root of the issue which is value extraction by land owners.
Capacity planning isn't a housing problem, directly. This is just one more symptom of the mind-numbingly-stupid "run to fail" operating mode currently used by Translink, BCFerries, and other P/P/P businesses.
How did 2022 Provincial Bill 7 die and why? As the very first step toward better management of BC Ferry Authority, it would have put us in a better position to demand, as residents, better service.
And then we can fix translink for the same comically-bad management at the smaller scale.