You'll cut me off.
Thanks for having me here today. I do have a few points that I'd like to highlight before we get started with the question period.
Briefly, the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association is, obviously, the voice of commercial trucking in Atlantic Canada, as well as the body that handles public affairs and government and media relations. It represents about 320 companies, including some of the largest carriers in Canada.
The trucking industry is the dominant mode of freight transportation in Atlantic Canada, responsible for the movement of 90% of all goods and two-thirds by value of Canada-U.S. trade. The for-hire trucking industry in Canada produces more than $20 billion in GDP and is expected to hit $24 billion in 2024. Taking into consideration expected labour productivity growth, this industry growth implies the need for 30,000 additional truck drivers by 2024, which in fact, could impact significantly the movement of goods in an efficient manner for years to come.
In terms of the overall Canadian economy, the importance of the role trucking plays cannot be overstated, with issues such as driver shortage, mandatory training, twinning of Highway 185 in Quebec, the Driver Inc. model, the mandatory electronic logging devices and trade barriers.
Some of our recommendations going forward were already presented in the pre-budget submission. The first recommendation would be to support key infrastructure projects to help facilitate Canadian trade. Twinning Highway 185, as I just mentioned, would be a great example of that. Also, the government needs to stop the widespread tax evasion in the trucking industry by addressing the new employment model known as Driver Inc. The government should restore federal excise tax rebates on certain GHG reduction technologies in the trucking industry, which were eliminated in budget 2016. It should mandate the e-logs or electronic logging devices, which needs to be done prior to January 1, 2020, so we are in line with the United States. It should expedite proposed modifications to the temporary foreign worker program. This is simply to enable us to access more foreign workers to address our driver shortage, which is at a crisis point at this time.
There are some details of all those recommendations in the few pages that follow, but I will end it here.
Thank you.