Driver Inc. is bad news for just about everyone

For months now I’ve been trying not to write about this subject, but I’m giving up. Driver Inc., as it’s called, is a scourge on the freight-hauling industry and I can’t ignore it any longer. So-called legacy carriers, the ones who play by the rules and who, by and large, treat their drivers reasonably well, have been joined in the business by a new breed of fleet that does not play by the rules, undercuts rates, and treats drivers like indentured servants, if even that well. And that’s a pretty kind way to describe them.

At the core of this new business model is the misclassification of workers as self-employed so as to cut costs by evading basic labour protections, payroll taxes, and other legal obligations.

If you haul logs in northern Ontario or beef on the prairies, be grateful, because you don’t want to compete against one of these outfits. Assuming this nightmare hasn’t reached you yet. I doubt it, but the spread has been rapid in the last decade or so. A couple of years ago Canadian Trucking Alliance president Stephen Laskowski claimed that Driver Inc. fleets represented 20% of the freight-hauling industry. It can only have grown from there, but I have yet to see credible numbers. There are tangential ways to measure it, however. For instance, in the Greater Toronto Area, I’ve read of data that shows self-employment amongst truck drivers has increased by 172% per cent over the past decade. That simply can’t be, or at least it can’t be legitimate.

So why was I hesitant to write about this? Because many of these newcomer carriers are largely run by immigrants, often South Asian, I’m afraid to say. And I love welcoming immigrants to Canada no matter where they came from, so I’m more than a little reluctant to admit that there are bad players among them. In some cases these newcomers are new to trucking and they usually hire drivers with or without experience from within their own ethnic communities. Those drivers seem to be trained poorly, more often than not, then paid as independent contractors, but they’re by no means owner-operators as we’ve historically known them.

Many drivers don’t know they have a choice

Misinformed, short-sighted drivers are all too ready to accept this independent contractor status and incorporate themselves to earn a few more pennies per mile. Trouble is, in many cases they don’t have a choice or simply don’t know that they have one. They may well be “fresh off the boat” and have been promised trucking jobs and ultimately Canadian citizenship by low-life immigration consultants working in concert with Driver Inc. fleets and often driver-training schools. They pay dearly for such arrangements. Canadian authorities have done absolutely nothing to stop such vicious immigration scams, though that may be changing as the feds have at least acknowledged the problem and have promised action. We’ll see.

Now I know what some of you are going to say after reading all this – Lockwood must be a racist. I’m not. I don’t care what you look or sound like, I just have to respect how you act. I won’t judge any whole group, racial or otherwise, by a few bad folks within it. In these terms I’m about as liberal as it gets.

Oh yeah, and you have to love dogs.

A cost in highway safety

What bothers me most about Driver Inc. is not just the exploitation of drivers, immigrant or not, but also what it means to highway safety. And it means a lot.

The thing is, training of these immigrant drivers is often part of the immigration package and they’re basically promised a licence. They go to sketchy driving schools, some owned by the fleets themselves, and they have only to go by the most basic minimum standard. Many of those schools or fleets have signing authority through, in Ontario, the Driver Certification Program (DCP). Other provinces have similar programs and they’re all recipes for disaster in the wrong hands. Sadly, they’re rarely if ever subject to inspection by the authorities.

Recently a sitting member of the Ontario legislature, Lise Vaugeois (NDP – Thunder Bay), raised the issue of too many truck crashes happening along the TransCanada Highway in her riding. In fact they’ve been happening with increasing frequency throughout northern Ontario and elsewhere for a few years now, many in the mountains of B.C. as well. We’re talking about tough roads to drive, especially in winter, and accidents have become so common that veteran drivers say they’re afraid to drive on them. Not because they can’t handle the conditions, but because the poorly trained newbies can’t. I hear this directly from them all the time. Like pretty much every day. Even from a distance, these accidents often bear the hallmark of inexperience, and my own chats with tow-truck drivers bear this out.

Vaugeois says one of the causes of this mayhem is lousy training, and she takes aim particularly at fleets that train and test their own drivers. After raising her concerns in the legislature, she spoke with a CBC News reporter and noted a 2019 report by the Ontario Auditor General. That report found that drivers licensed by way of the province’s DCP had a significantly higher passing rate than those licensed through its own testing centers. Surprise!

In that CBC interview Vaugeois quoted the report in which the Auditor General said: “We found that between 2014/15 and 2018/19 drivers tested by carriers had a pass rate of 95% compared with just 69% at DriveTest centers. However, 25% of the 106 carriers that test their own drivers ranked among the worst 1% of all carriers for at-fault collision performance.”

Enforcement needed

So where do we sit with all this now? I think federal immigration officials have a hell of a lot to answer for to start with. Not news. As do provincial ministries of education for failing to create and enforce meaningful standards and allowing slipshod schools to flourish. A very old story, that one. And, of course, enforcement officials charged with keeping the roads safe — and the trucks themselves in safe trim — seem to be invisible, often due to budget cuts. Then there’s the Canada Revenue Agency, which appears to have done nothing to define “independent contractor” and then apply a measure of enforcement on those who abuse its meaning in the workplace. Then again, CRA has been trying – and failing — to define the term for decades, ever since a group of Newfoundland owner-operators raised a ruckus and demanded vacation pay 40 years ago.

Some progress has finally been made both provincially and federally, I have to admit, and Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland promised Driver Inc. action in her mini-budget last fall. That doesn’t make highways any safer and it doesn’t mean innocent immigrant drivers will be treated any better tomorrow, but it’s a start, if a late one.