Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.
My name is David Bradley. I'm CEO of the Canadian Trucking Alliance. We represent in excess of 4,500 trucking companies across Canada.
It is our view that Bill C-257 is unnecessary, and if you'll bear with me, I'd like to explain why.
First, a little bit about our industry. We are the dominant mode of freight transportation in the country. We touch 90% of all consumer products and foodstuffs, and we make an exceedingly important contribution in terms of Canada's international trade, hauling two-thirds, by value, of Canada's trade with the United States.
The broader trucking industry includes for-hire carriers, which can be either federally or provincially regulated, and private carriers, which are those that move their own goods and are provincially regulated. The industry employs in excess of 350,000 Canadians. Those are direct jobs.
A third of the total trucking labour force are employee drivers in the for-hire trucking sector—and when I say employee drivers, that's distinct from the independent owner-operator contractor.
The proportion of truck drivers who fall under the federal labour regulations is not known with certainty, but according to HRSDC, just over 100,000 employees in trucking are covered by at least some part of the Canada Labour Code.
Trucking is made up predominantly of small firms. About 78% of employee drivers work for companies with fewer than 100 people, and 39% work for companies employing fewer than 20.
The level of unionization in our industry—at no more than 20% of employee drivers—is relatively low compared to the general workforce.
With regard to Bill C-257, for us it's a question of balance. Collective bargaining is a question of balance. Parties to any negotiation attempt to gain an upper hand through various means. The role of the regulatory environment is to try to ensure a level playing field and to maintain the appropriate balance in negotiations, not to confer the upper hand to either party through legislation or regulation.
In our view, the current climate of labour relations in the trucking industry would suggest that balance exists. While the level of unionization, as I said, is low, the portion of the industry that is unionized is characterized by stable labour relations. In the period 2000 to 2006, there were only seven work stoppages in the trucking industry in companies regulated by part I of the Canada Labour Code. The average length of work stoppage during that period was 15.5 days. There were no strikes or lockouts by companies under federal jurisdiction in either 2004 or 2005. Not known in these work stoppages is the degree to which replacement workers were used. However, we feel that there were very few, if any, used.
The nature and structure of the trucking industry has characteristics that promote balance and labour stability. For one, competition is always vigorous and often fierce. There are at least 10,000 for-hire trucking companies competing for freight, and that's a reflection of economic deregulation that has existed in our industry since the late-1980s. Economic deregulation and fierce competition dictate that carriers will survive only if costs are controlled and if they provide the service to which their customers have become accustomed.
Trucking service is a perishable service. It's not like a manufactured product, where if you don't get your price today it can sit on the shelf until another customer comes in tomorrow. We don't have that luxury in the trucking industry. If a carrier's not happy with the price it is able to obtain for its service, there's always someone else who will take the freight, either at that price or at a lower price.
There's competition not only for freight but also for qualified drivers. There's a lot of driver mobility, and the resulting turnover or churn in the industry is extremely high. In some sectors it approaches 100%. So in the event of a protracted strike at a trucking company, the organization would soon be out of business. Competitors would move quickly to take over that freight.
From a broader societal view, we raise the following concerns. Trucking serves every community accessible by road. In remote areas, many communities are served only by truck, and delays in delivering to Canada's most vulnerable communities could be devastating for its residents.
Of particular concern is the volume of just-in-time freight delivered across Canada and into the United States. Transportation disruptions in just-in-time delivery could affect our major trading partner's confidence in the cross-border supply chain, resulting in reduced sourcing of products from Canada.
In the event of a labour stoppage in other federally regulated freight modes such as rail, we simply do not have the capacity, nor do we have the kind of equipment, that would be used to move most of what rail does. So it would prevent us from taking up any slack that there may be.
The potential to have transportation services halted, ports closed, and intermodal facilities shut down would be felt by all Canadians.
As I said at the outset, we feel that Bill C-257 is unnecessary. Some have even referred to it as a solution in search of a problem. Evidence from jurisdictions across Canada shows that either banning or allowing replacement workers has little or no impact on the frequency or duration of work stoppages.
Again, according to HRSDC, the average number of working days lost because of strikes has gone down in nearly all provinces in the past several decades—including British Columbia, where there is a ban, and Ontario, where there is not. The existence of or the lack of anti-replacement-worker legislation appears to have nothing to do with this general trend in labour relations.
Parliamentary intervention to order employees back to work occurred frequently before 1999, when the amendments to the Canada Labour Code prevented the necessity of such legislation. Bill C-257 would turn the clock back. Pressures for return-to-work legislation to assure continuity of essential services could again become the norm.
Thank you very much.