Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to go directly to driver compensation and drill down into that area.
I grew up in a blue-collar town in Chilliwack and knew numerous people who raised families by driving long-haul trucks. Until a few years back, that is what they did to put food on the table. They lived a comfortable lifestyle.
I've heard stories since then about the rates for the routes that they used to cover, going back 20 years, and companies undercutting what had been the going rate for a number of years. They were clearly not paying the going rate or the previous prevailing wage to their drivers.
I want to talk a bit about mileage rates versus hourly rates, and what you're seeing. Are certain companies—some bad actors—taking advantage of vulnerable people and not paying a fair wage—or even minimum wage, it would seem—in some of these cases?
If we're going to ask companies to go to an hourly wage or if we believe that it would help address the driver shortage, what are we doing to alleviate the dwell times or the turnaround time problems at inland ports?
I talked to one of my colleagues, who said that he had a constituent reach out to him. He said he used to be able to turn a truck 1.8 times a day and now he's lucky if he can turn it once. It's easy to say he should pay an hourly wage, but if his driver is not moving product because things are jammed up at the inland ports or at the intermodal yards and so on, how is he going to do that?
I want to talk a bit about your concerns about the wide variance in wages. I'll go to Mr. Corey first. Are people cheating the system? Is there any policing happening for that? If so, what is it? Maybe some others can weigh in on the problems with port wait times, etc., that are going to make it more difficult to change the compensation model.