TORONTO (April 29) — The Canadian Fleet Maintenance Seminar seems bound to alter its 36-year course in the near future, but nothing was resolved at a panel session on Tuesday afternoon. It was, rather, an exploratory session, the first time the Seminar has so publicly examined its future.

The key issue: should the Seminar align itself with the Ontario Trucking Association by becoming part of that group’s Truck World 2000 truck show to be held in September of next year?

Entitled “Co-operative Plan for Truck Maintenance & Training on a National Basis for the New Millennium: What Role Should We Play?”, the two-hour discussion featured a presentation by OTA president David Bradley. While saying he wasn’t there “to deliver a sales pitch,” Bradley effectively made the case for some kind of link between the CFMS and the OTA.

With respect to the coming OTA show, he said his organization’s own maintenance group will be staging technical sessions with or without the assistance of the CFMS and its organizing body, the Ontario-based Automotive Transportation Service Superintendents Association (ATSSA). But it would be better if the CFMS came on board, he implied.

“We’re willing to listen to ideas about how to make it better. Clearly, we would like to move forward as an industry,” Bradley told delegates. “You have something we don’t have: a grass-roots organization.”

He invited the CFMS/ATSSA to join OTA in “focused and meaningful discussions” on the subject, with the proviso that there should be a strong mandate to do so from ATSSA members.

“If it doesn’t work out, we’ll have no less respect for you,” he said.

The implications of such a link are many, including the possibility that a 36-year tradition of holding the seminar every Spring at the Inn on the Park hotel in Toronto would end. That prospect didn’t seem to excite one of the other panelists. Jim Pinder, fleet operations manager at MacKinnon Transport and this year’s CFMS program manager, talked proudly of the Seminar’s traditions and of his own family’s long connection with it.

But even he acknowledged, if obliquely, that things might change in referring to the search for replacements for retiring CFMS general manager Stan Williamson and his assistant Art Dawson.

“The Seminar committee and ATSSA executive are looking for an individual to take over the manager’s responsibilities … to meet the future needs of the Seminar,” he said. “The new manager will need to pursue opportunities and to heighten the profile of the Seminar with new alignments in the industry. All activities will be subject to in-depth review.”

Panelist Glenn Tristram, fleet supervisor for the City of Brampton and president of the ATSSA Toronto chapter, raised the apprenticeship issue, a perennial source of frustration for ATSSA members.

Citing the need for a national truck and bus technician standard, and a national certification program for fleet managers, he said there must be partnerships with other associations representing all aspects of the industry in order to reach these goals. New standards must be industry-driven, he said.

“We can no longer look at ourselves from a local, provincial or even national perspective,” Tristram concluded. “We must look at ourselves as North American. I challenge all of us gathered here today to start working together towards this goal for the betterment of our great industry.”

But “It’s difficult for volunteer groups to get things done,” Bradley said, reaching the heart of the matter. The Seminar is run by members of the eight ATSSA chapters, who donate their time. The only “hired hands” are Williamson and Dawson.

Bradley, who also heads the Canadian Trucking Alliance, noted that “governments don’t want to talk to a million groups” in the course of reaching policy decisions. He went on in that vein at some length, saying industry groups increasingly need a North American focus, that they must have the resources to manage long-term liaison with both politicians and bureaucrats.

Both OTA and CTA have those resources, he said.

In fact, with the sole exception of efforts in the apprenticeship realm, neither the Seminar nor the ATSSA have ever seen themselves as lobby groups and have never attempted to influence governments. Their purpose, more simply, has been to keep members abreast of best practices and changes in the technical sphere. One key question facing them, therefore, is: should that purely educational focus change?

Bradley noted that the OTA formed its own maintenance council three years ago after the realization that most of the issues it dealt with involved truck maintenance. It needed a forum for an exchange of views, he said. More particularly, the OTA needed a better understanding of technical matters in order to lobby government more effectively.

In the end, while it seems clear that any link between OTA and the CFMS/ATSSA would be good for the industry at large, there are strong traditions at risk. It’s those traditions that ATSSA members will be considering in the months to come.