TORONTO — Government policy discourages people from breaking into the trucking industry because it does not recognize truck driving as a skilled occupation, the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) claims.

Just take a look at the changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) that federal Employment Minister Jason Kenney announced earlier in June.

“On the one hand, the government wants the TFWP to be a last resort or perhaps disappear altogether,” says David Bradley, president of the CTA. “On the other, because truck drivers are lumped in with unskilled, low wage jobs like burger flippers, younger or displaced Canadians are unable to access programs like the Canada Jobs Grant, which would help them with the costs of the training they need before obtaining a commercial licence and becoming employable.”

“This is a real disincentive for people who might otherwise consider a truck driving career,” Bradley adds.

Kenney announced the government is phasing out the TFWP. They’re also going to have more inspections, higher fees to apply for temporary foreign workers, hefty fines of up to $100,000 for violators and more criminal investigations, to name a few changes.

“In an industry as fragmented and diverse as trucking, it’s not surprising there are varying opinions on the TFWP,” Bradley says. “Even prior to the announced changes, the program was considered by most to be too cumbersome and restrictive for anything other than a temporary, stop-gap measure to fill unseated trucks when a company is unable to fill those positions with qualified Canadians.”

“The TFWP is what it is,” he says. “It’s not an ideal program, nor is it a solution to the shortage of qualified truck drivers. But it’s all that is available to fill some seats on a temporary basis for those who choose to use it.”

The Conference Board of Canada estimates that about 33,000 drivers will be needed in the for-hire trucking sector by 2020. 

Bradley says the industry does not expect government to solve the driver shortage, but governments have an important role to play, too.

“They determine which occupations are eligible for shared training funds; which qualify for immigration; and they set licensing standards and oversee the training institutions,” he says.

While industry stakeholders agree that truck driving should be considered a skilled occupation, the fact that it isn’t is a big challenge to addressing the driver shortage, Bradley says.  

CTA and the provincial trucking associations are calling upon the provincial governments to introduce mandatory entry level training for truck drivers. With the support of Employment and Social Development Canada, the Driving the Future Project – being managed by Trucking HR Canada in cooperation with CTA –  is developing a new national occupational standard for entry level truck drivers and laying out a framework for better labour market information.

And Bradley says the CTA wants to work with the federal and provincial governments to fulfill the industry’s need for qualified Canadian transport operators or with qualified immigrant drivers on a path to citizenship.

One of the TFWP changes – the move from categorizing occupations as skilled or non-skilled to looking at wages paid in comparison to the province’s average– may reflect an effort to deal with the skilled versus unskilled issue, he says. But that’s not a good solution for trucking.

“The wages and the demands of the job for local pick-up and delivery drivers, for example, cannot be compared to those of long distance over-the-highway drivers, where wages tend to be higher and the shortage is felt most acutely,” Bradley says.