Our neighbors to the north—Canada—are facing a truck driver shortage that threatens to impact the country’s supply chain but will also affect its service truck repair and maintenance industry.
Simple math dictates that fewer trucks on the road means fewer opportunities for on-site vehicle repairs or even maintenance.
Although the U.S. is not at the same point as Canada—yet—what lessons can we take from this?
According to Lewie Pugh, the Executive Vice-president of OOIDA (Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association), any commentary about American truck driver shortages, is not true.
In a letter to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Pugh noted that over 400,000 commercial licenses are issued per year, but that the U.S. Department of Labor said high turnover of drivers at large carriers was a reason for the perceived shortage.
Said Pugh: “For decades, our country’s largest motor carriers and the trade associations that represent them have perpetuated the myth of a driver shortage to promote policies that maintain the cheapest labor supply possible.”
In the U.K., fuel supply issues have snarled the trucking industry as a whole, impairing the trucking supply chain of products to consumers.
Wither Canada? Although fuel supply issues are not a concern, driver supply is.
According to a CBC News report, Mark Cadieux, President of the Quebec Trucking Association, complained that his province was about 3,000 drivers short, saying that carriers have the work, but are unable to find enough drivers to perform the duties.
A Trucking HR Canada report analyzing 2021 Q2, noted an 18,000 truckdriver shortage in Canada.
Although the far-reaching effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a worker shortage, age and retirement is the biggest concern for the Canadian trucking sector, and finding new, younger drivers to replace them is proving to be a difficult task.
A 2019 Canadian government report from Statistics Canada showed that 31-percent of all male transport truck drivers were 55-years-old or older, numbers borne from 2016 census data.
Factor in the ensuing five years to 2021, and one can see that Canada’s truck drivers are or are on the verge of aging out of the profession and into retirement.
Finding new drivers is key to the industry surviving, not to mention ancillary services such as service truck mobile repair and maintenance, as well as the country’s economic supply chain.
In Quebec, women currently represent only 4-percent of the truck driving workforce.
It’s not that biases are preventing women from entering the field, it is, more than likely a factor of people realizing the profession is available to them as an employment option.
As for young drivers in general, the CBC News report highlighted the example of a young man who had dreamed of being a truck driver since he was a child. Despite the opportunity to make upwards of $48,000 a year doing day runs with no inter-provincial travel required, he only lasted four days on the job before quitting.
The young driver cited the 4AM start time and having to cross the Peace Bridge into the U.S. as factors into quitting the industry—and other similar stories abound about others. No one ever said the trucking industry was easy.
Other factors include the relatively expensive training expenses just to get a Canadian commercial trucking license. No such time factors or costs exist if one wants to enter the construction industry, for example.
Trucking HR Canada noted that in order to just keep up with demand, some 17,230 truck drivers a year must be hired until 2025.
Teamsters Canada said that many trucking companies are re-hiring recently retired drivers to come back and haul. While a nice short-term solution, it does not work in the long-term.
For Canada, its driver shortage appears to be a marketing issue to Generation Z. How are we doing, America?