Thank you for the question.
The one I touched on recently is that we need the funding dollars. We need them opened up. We need them dedicated. We need them there now. We need people to get in and access the trucking industry, and many of them can't afford to do it if we don't have the dedicated funding available to allow people to get in and train. That is the first key thing.
We have to deal with the issue of insurance, and Angela touched on it a bit. There is a specific problem in provinces that don't have the government-funded insurance. I'll use myself as an example. I started in the transportation industry as a professional truck driver when I was 18—33 years ago. It was a very small trucking company in an agriculture area with 10 trucks. That wouldn't happen today. It would not happen in the province of Ontario today, simply because they can't get insurance.
A lot of these individuals are getting trained, in some cases to work for a small family operation, but they can't get insured to work for that family operation. They then end up having to go to a big carrier and move into long haul. That's great, but not everybody wants to do long haul, and we're losing those candidates at the start. If we wait until they're 25, 26 or 27 years old, they've already made a career choice. We need to be able to give them access to this industry at 18, and many of them are going to do it through family businesses. Those avenues are being closed right now because of the issues we're having with insurance.
I don't want to take up everybody's time, so those are two key recommendations I would put in place to get people trained and allow them to have access to jobs.