Thank you, Chair, and members, for inviting me. I always appreciate the opportunity to have this forum and this platform.
In November 2021, Canada reciprocated an October announcement by the U.S. that unvaccinated cross-border truck drivers would no longer be allowed to cross the border without requiring quarantine, by January. Our industry expressed concern for the effect that might have, in an already tough time, on the mode of transport we rely on most for the critical export corridors that underpin our livelihoods.
At the time, I said this to the Toronto Star:
Trucking is the lifeblood of our industry. Cars get shipped via rail, parts get shipped by truck. This is hitting the industry at a time when supply chains are having the most difficulty they've had in a hundred years.
In fact, about half the production we make a year is exported that way, $18-billion worth or so in a normal year.
As the deadlines approached and affected drivers began to make themselves heard in public, I was circumspect in an interview with Automotive News:
What will happen here is, if we're down 20 per cent of truckers, industries like ours will have to up-bid our access to available drivers.
In a Sun Media interview, I expanded on my point and my concerns:
...the trucking shortages, now exacerbated by the mandates, will cost parts makers in both Canada and the United States. [Our] members will now be competing with those wanting to move all kinds of goods as they seek truck space and drivers.
I was, and still am, a strong supporter of vaccinations, but we caution that governments have to be sensitive and flexible to what is happening. It was always going to be a choppy transition, but the public health leadership in this country had, by most quantitative measures, placed Canada favourably in comparison with the United States and other major countries around the world. We took this latest hurdle as something we could absorb for the greater good.
In March 2020, when the COVID pandemic caught everyone unprepared, it was auto parts companies that initiated the largest peacetime mobilization of Canada's industrial capacity in response. Our call to action was echoed immediately by government. Within two weeks, parts companies began to make masks, shields, ventilators, vaccine coolers, swabs and gowns. Dozens did so without purchase orders. Our industry has served as the prime example of extraordinary civic duty, and we've done so proudly for the last two years.
This is the context in which we experienced the lawless blockade of the Ambassador Bridge by anti-government actors who cloaked themselves in a phony “truckers” cause that shut down Canada's most important cross-border asset for the first time since 9/11. That singular event in February, which seemingly paralyzed governments and law enforcement as well, cost the highly integrated automotive sector approximately $1 billion in unrecoverable production, and then cost approximately 100,000 Canadian automotive workers similar shift and pay losses.
On a regular day, about 10,000 actual truck drivers pick up and deliver $50 million in goods from Canadian parts companies and deliver them to their U.S. customers. They return with a similar load from U.S. factories to Canadian automakers. Those drivers were forced to stay home, unpaid, while people who pretended to be them forced them to lose actual work.
[Technical difficulty—Editor] inauthentic political actors in Ottawa who shamelessly egged on their social media followers, and then was carried out by a couple of dozen macroeconomically illiterate followers. Its cost to Canadian industry in shipments is dwarfed by its cost in goodwill.
It was unfortunate that a court order secured on February 14, 2022, by the APMA as lead plaintiff was required to kick-start the enforcement of the law in Windsor. We need to have a better overall mitigation plan in place amongst all levels of government to avoid future “freedom barbecues” from blockading critical public infrastructure.
Next week I will meet with the White House for the first time since this blockade ended to talk about how we continue to build an electrified Canada-U.S. auto sector together. I thought it best to let the dust settle and the embarrassment subside before I returned to Washington to lecture Americans about their trade obligations to Canada.
Thank you.