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driver and employer. Canada Rev- enue Agency and Employment and Social Development Canada both recently condemned the practice, following pressure from the CTA to do so, and refers to these opera- tors as personal service businesses (PSBs), which eliminates any tax advantage to the driver.
“CRA has now issued a declara- tion, and those individuals are not entitled to small business deduc- tions. Labour Canada has said this individual would be typically deemed an employee and we will treat them as such, so the employer now owes these individuals overtime, vacation pay, severance, etc.” Laskowski said.
He added the association’s focus will now shift to enforcement and education.
Seymour applauded the develop- ment.
“This is out of control,” he said. He is now seeing companies who engaged in the practice racing to fix it, including some who are looking to exit the business altogether through a sale.
“I don’t think anyone in their right minds is going to touch them with the liability that could potentially follow the business,” he said.
Carriers who used this model now face few options to remedy the situ- ation. They can convert the PSBs to employees, issue T4A forms to the PSBs, or lease trucks to those driv- ers so they become lease-operators, but that would still require the issu- ance of a T4A. There’s no easy out, Seymour said.
“It’s going to add costs to the business and for those who’ve been doing a lot of it, it’s no doubt going to cause them to have to push price up to be amongst all the oth- ers who’ve had higher input costs of labor,” he said.
Better training
The panel also addressed the issue of driver training, and a unanimous desire to see mandatory entry-level driver training (MELT) rolled out nationally. Laskowski said there could be some news on this in January.
The high-profile truck crash with the Humboldt Broncos team bus brought the issue to the fore- front, and highlighted the need for higher barriers to entry, Sey- mour said.
“To me, what it shines a light on is how easy it is to be the operator of a truck and the owner of a trucking company,” he said. “I frankly think intensifying sensible regulations is the way to go, and make it such that there’s a higher level of entry and a higher standard to be in the game so we minimize these sorts of things from happening.”
Seymour’s own 25-year-old son was among the first to be trained under Ontario’s MELT program, and Seymour said he was encouraged by the result.
“There are just too many people out there driving a truck that have been poorly trained and trained to a very low standard,” he said. “I don’t see that as their fault. I see that as the fault of the system.” TN
and tell you, I don’t think we will see autonomous trucks in preva- lence on our roadways until after I retire,” he said. “These things cost a ton of money. If there is a steer- ing wheel and a seat, you’re going to need someone to sit there. If some- thing happens to the truck you need someone there to take over in an emergency.”
There may be a push to mandate advanced driver assistance systems, such as collision mitigation systems, Heller said.
“Should we mandate this tech- nology or wait on it, knowing the industry eventually comes around to adopting it if it works?” he asked.
Another issue facing the industry on both sides of the border is the legalization of marijuana in Canada, and some states. There are now more marijuana dispensaries in the city of Denver than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined, Heller noted. States that have legalized pot have seen an increase in fatal crashes in which marijuana was a factor.
The U.S. is also struggling with an opioid epidemic, and carriers are pushing to use hair testing to detect drug use. The problem, said Heller, is that only seven labs in the U.S. pro- vide hair testing and they all use dif- ferent methods. They are also about twice the cost of urine testing.TN
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Trucking needs more sensible regs, not fewer: TCA
By James Menzies
BRAMPTON, ONTARIO
There is no appetite in Washington to reduce trucking regulations, but there is great potential to make the regulations that trucking operates under more sensible.
That was the message Dave Heller, vice-president of government affairs with the Truckload Carriers Asso- ciation (TCA), brought to Canada during the Bridging Border Barri- ers conference Nov. 14. He said elec- tronic logging devices (ELDs) are generating the data needed to fine- tune trucking regulations, including hours-of-service.
To lobby for fewer regulations when fatal truck crashes are trend- ing upwards is the wrong approach, Heller said.
“Talking about reducing regula- tions is not the conversation you want to have right now,” he said.
Just four weeks after the ELD man- date became fully enforced in April, 96% of the U.S. trucking industry was in compliance, Heller said. The data being generated by the devices is
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allowing fleets to better track deten- tion time and can be used by policy- makers to design better regulations. The U.S. hours-of-service rules are currently under review, which Heller said was made possible by the imple- mentation of ELDs.
ELDs, he said, “are providing a pro- verbial data explosion this industry has never seen before. It’s painting a more accurate picture of what drivers face on a daily basis...the data mined through ELDs is astronomical.”
When discussing regulations with lawmakers, “data is king,” Heller said. Aspects of the hours-of-service rules that are under review, include: the mandatory 30-minute break, splitting the sleeper berth time, per- sonal conveyance restrictions, and the ability to pause the 14-hour clock
for up to three hours.
Another issue that’s prevalent in
the U.S. and Canada is the short- age of qualified drivers. With rates increasing, Heller said carriers are being more selective about the ship- pers they service. He expressed some doubt about the industry’s ability to fill the void with younger drivers
Dave Heller
engaging in interstate commerce. A pilot program is underway that will allow 18- to 21-year-old military vet- erans to drive commercial vehicles across state lines, but few veterans within that age group have left mil- itary service.
“Can teenagers cure this prob- lem?” Heller asked of the driver shortage. “It’s probably not the way to go. Getting teen drivers to oper- ate in interstate commerce has been tried many times. The industry needs to get better at retaining the popula- tion of drivers we have now.”
He also said autonomous trucks won’t solve the problem anytime soon.
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