By: G. Ray Gompf, CD
There’s an old trucking association reviving itself simply because the voice of the small business trucker is no longer heard in regulatory circles. It’s easier to revive an established group that isn’t functioning than to create a completely new group to establish instant credibility.
There have been many groups across Canada that have come and gone. Some have come out of established groups and have overcome any the baggage left behind. The Western Professional Truckers Association is one such group to renew and is now seeking membership.
The WPTA is different in that the leadership looks more like a committee of the sane, rather than the usual group starting with a self-appointed leader with a cause and he or she finds enough people to say yes and the leadership runs with his or her agenda and usually that agenda is a narrow view on a very complex issue.
The WPTA is taking a different approach by looking at the big picture, starting to eat this very large, very complex elephant one bite at a time.
Safety and security on the road is probably one of the biggest issues amongst those of us behind the wheel. In the past few years, the number of wrecks, incidents and close calls has exponentially risen. Too many of these wrecks (there are no accidents) involve deaths, unnecessary deaths. It’s certainly not for the lack of rules; enforcement may be a little slack, in that enforcement is a lot reactive, a little short proactive.
Government policy may have a great deal of impact on safety by allowing the less than properly trained behind the wheel.
The Professional Truck Training Association of Canada formed in April 2024 and is leading the charge to make Truck Driving a Red Seal Skilled Trade to both standardize training, instil lifelong learning skills development, and move towards proactive government oversight.
Road safety is the responsibility of each and every road user. Our roads are shared with all levels of driving skill, both commercially and privately. We must, as an industry, ensure those within our industry are the best, most qualified, and yes, policed on the roads and bring these insane wreck figures down as close to zero as humanly possible.
The trouble with saying your goals and objectives are road safe is that there’s causes for road safety failures. It’s easy to blame certain demographics of the industry. It’s easy to blame the immigration policies of the government. It’s easy to blame the under skilled. It’s easy to blame many perceived reasons for the failures and yes, the wreck rate is a failure.
The Humboldt wreck brought that failure to be fully exposed and the rats took for the hills and too many fingers were pointed in too many directions and the cover ups, butt covering was in full blown action.
Training was one direction the fingers pointed, so the solution was Mandatory Entry Level Training and instantly, those who shall always seek a loophole found enough loopholes to not just crawl through but run through three abreast.
It’s well and good for governments to make rules but without accountability why do they bother? Without accountability those who care not for rules won’t bother.
Yes, we need to have organizations speaking for the sane in the industry and working to thwart those who don’t play well in our sandbox. We need organizations that are trying to unite our industry regardless of the ways our government has tried to divide us.
The big guys in the industry have had their kick at the can and have screwed it up. It’s time for the little guys to join groups with safety as their main agenda and get their voice heard at the levels that must be required to listen and get action that saves lives. And importantly, only those in certified accountable skill development to train the newcomers.
It’s not an easy thing to simply define a goal when the tentacles of that goal are so abundant that the objectives can be easily directed into hundreds of issues.
Safety must be the goal. The direction of the tentacles must be contained and controlled.
