High training and insurance costs bring hiring challenges for small carrier companies

He said in the past, someone could go into a driver testing centre, write their paper test and follow that up with a road test – much like when getting a standard car license.

The current issue at hand, as he sees it, revolves around cost and insurance rates.

“The problem with coming out of MELT is you’re not insurable to most companies, so that MELT trainer or trainee can only go to the large companies that are self-insured. They (larger fleets) don’t go out to third party insurance (companies), they do it internally. You have a big, multi-national company, (and) they carry their own pink card. It says ‘x-trucking’ on it, it doesn’t say Wawanesa (Insurance) or whomever,” he said.

“They have a huge advantage of taking that MELT driver on and they do a good job with them. They have their own internal training programs and mentorship programs, which is great for a two, three, four, 500 truck fleet (but) it’s very difficult to do when you’re a five-truck fleet. So now, that MELT driver is not accessible to that five-truck fleet.”

Currie noted that MELT regulations and training vary by jurisdiction, but the program is expected to roll out county-wide in the future. Manitoa’s MELT program is slated to become active in September, while Ontario already has MELT in place.

“MELT will, at the end of the day, help because a truck driver with his license is a driver with his license, whether he goes to work for a big 500 truck fleet to get his experience…the trouble with that is other companies that can’t take the MELT trainee are going to go poaching them once they hit the three years or whatever their insurance requirement is for their on-the-road training,” he said.

“MELT is great in the fact that it has brought awareness, it is some training, it’s getting the drivers into the big fleets – not the little ones but into the big ones, it’s still a driver on the road. The trouble with MELT is it makes the cost high for training, which is a real problem.”

He remarked that training schools are becoming more apprehensive and it’s more and more difficult to attract younger generations to enter the professional driving industry.

“Each school has different weights and how much effort and focus that they put into each module, but the cost is high. Currently, you can’t get an Alberta Student Loan for it. You can use your RESP money, if your parents put away for that for you, but how do you dig out $10,000 to go be a truck driver, when you can go get a Student Loan and be a dental hygienist,” Currie said.

BECOMING A TRADE

Currie said one way to raise interest in a career in this field is by making it a trade. However, that’s a long and arduous process.

“In order to implement it as a trade, you have to have 90 percent of the people in the industry agree. Well, there’s 25 to 30-thousand carriers in Alberta. That’s like trying to put cats in a bag. You’re never going to get that many people to answer, you won’t get 90 percent of people to answer on it, let alone agree,” he said.

“So, do you make the trainer the red seal trade, so that they’re held to the standard and it’s an even standard – you don’t have jo-blo in Vauxhall pencil-whipping drivers licenses. Hold it to a certain accredited level. Maybe the truck driver needs to be an occupation – an accountant’s not a trade, it’s an occupation, but it still has a designation to it that there’s a level of professionalism and that’s maybe where we need to go with truck driving.”

He said that another concern for companies is that a new trainee will go through the training process or make it mid-way through and leave the program.

However, Currie said, “I worry more about not training the people that stay. You just have to have that training. You used to be able to just work hard and get the job done…now you can’t. You gotta have some accreditation and maybe the accreditation is having this as an occupation. That might be what draws people in. All these millennials, they want a designation, they want to be somebody. They don’t want to just be the person behind the wheel.”

Currie explained that he’s currently looking for drivers to work with Gateway Carriers. The company currently has 15 to 18 company drivers and around 25 owner-operators, who own their vehicles and sublet them to the Taber-based outfit.

“We’re actually very small (company) at the end of the day. There’s a lot of one-horse outfits out there but then there’s a lot of big ones. The biggest carrier in Alberta, to my understanding, is the City of Edmonton. Think about how many snowplows and all the equipment that they have.”

He explained that there’s a notion that a trucking company is solely a business that has a fleet of large shipping vehicles, but that’s not necessarily the case, such as with the City of Edmonton.

He used Home Depot as another example of a business that could be considered a trucking company.

“Home Depot has a truck that delivers around town. You don’t think of Home Depot as a carrier, but they are – it’s a professional driver…The mobile paper shredder guy that comes around, he’s got a Class 3 (license), he’s a professional driver. The lady that picks my kids up in the morning to go to school, she’s a professional driver,” he said.

“There’s so much more to a professional driver than just trucks. It’s a wide range and everybody is suffering difficulties in finding people to drive. It doesn’t matter if it’s a taxi company or a livestock company, they’re all short of people.”

AN EVOLVING INDUSTRY

One notion is that truck drivers will be behind the wheel ‘until their eyeballs hang out’, Currie said. But, that’s not the case these days.

“The facilities now are getting better, a lot of facilities, especially in the United States, you get to a travel plaza to stop for a night and there’s a gym there, there’s walking trails there. It’s not ‘park on the side of the road and go to sleep on a little tiny box with a sleeping bag’ anymore,” he said.

“Even the equipment (on trucks) is outstanding. There’s fridges and bunk beds and everything have Sirius (Satellite) radio. It’s so much more creature comforts available now than 30 years ago. It is not what people think.”

He noted that he hopes as time goes on, the industry can continue to evolve for the better. For now, though, there still is a lack of professional drivers.

“MELT is the first step. It can go so much farther, and it needs to. The other thing we have to be careful with MELT is it’s going to cut the ‘I don’t know if I want to do that’ out. The wannabe guy is going to be gone, but are we going to put ourselves in a position where we can’t compete with the United States with their fly-by-night driver,” he said.

“We hold ourselves to this high level of training and education and certification, but somebody comes in out of the United States and into Canada, there’s nothing stopping them. Or, let’s say Saskatchewan doesn’t do it, they’re driving on the Alberta roads…how do you regulate that? Does it make us non-competitive that we can’t afford, as a trucking, because it costs me tens of thousands of dollars to put you in a truck (and) jo-blo in Shelby, Montana, it costs him five dollars. How do I compete with the guy out of Shelby?”

Currie told Lethbridge News Now that at the end of the day, “everything is driven by economics’.

“My truck costs me $2,000 a month for insurance. Their (U.S. companies) truck costs them $2,000 per year. It costs me $10,000 to get a driver trained. It costs them $1,000. How do you compete? They wreck six trucks; I don’t wreck any. Now all of a sudden, I’m more competitive. It’s such a fine line of how far do you go until you make yourself un-competitive, but you’re not competitive if you don’t have somebody in the seat. An empty truck is not competitive,” he said.

He added that owners are finding it difficult to bring in foreign workers as well.

“If it was an occupation, it would be a lot easier to bring somebody in. I’ve had people come through with LMIAs (Labour Market Impact Assessment) and some great people were not able to get residency, so they had to leave. They come from Europe, sell their house, buy one here, they buy cars, pay taxes, but then they have to leave, because it’s not a skilled trade,” he said.

“It’s tough, it’s very cyclical. It’s ‘here’s your problem, here’s your solution and all that makes another problem’. You have to somewhere find an end to it (and) MELT might be the point where you break the chain, get in and start building for it. It’s only a start.”

Currie concluded by saying that as cost-challenging it can be to get new drivers on the roads, MELT is a stepping stone to where the industry needs to get to.

by Justin Goulet

High training and insurance costs bring hiring challenges for small carrier companies

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