Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning. I'd like to thank the committee for giving the crisis of Driver Inc. the time it deserves today.
My name is Mark Bylsma. I am the president of Spring Creek Carriers and the current chair of the Ontario Trucking Association.
Spring Creek is located in Beamsville, Ontario, in the riding of Niagara West. We operate approximately 40 trucks, primarily hauling less than truckload freight between the U.S. and Canada.
We're a first-generation family business and we're celebrating 30 years of business this year. It is sad to say that we will not be a second-generation family business. Like many of our colleagues and many other family trucking companies, we’ve told our kids to find a career in a different industry, because unlike 30 years ago, there’s no future for trucking in Canada.
The sole reason for this last statement is summarized by these two words: Driver Inc. In my remarks, I'm going to assume that you have read the CTA report and costing appendix, as it explains this crisis very well, along with our recommendations.
As an owner, I've done the math. As a relatively small carrier, if I utilize the illegal Driver Inc. model just for tax purposes, not including the additional shortcuts and scams the CTA has summarized in their report, we would save, conservatively, $1.5 million per year in payroll taxes and employee benefits like vacations, overtime and sick days. When you compare that to my revenue of under $15 million, you can see that this is more than 10%. Most people in our industry don't make 10% in a good year.
I'm going to get a little granular in some numbers. My average revenue per shipment last year was $650. The Driver Inc. crowd can do that for $585, and in today's economic climate I'll lose an order over $10. Imagine if my customers could save $65. They wouldn't even call me again.
This isn’t about the Driver Inc. crowd being smarter and more efficient. It's about stealing $65 on every order. It's about stealing $1.5 million from the Canadian people and from our government every year. Those numbers are small in comparison to the overall problem, because Spring Creek is small in comparison to the overall industry. The billions of dollars outlined in the CTA package are not made up. They're not fabricated.
I am and will forever be a capitalist. Only the strong survive. “Laissez-faire” is what I've always said. What does laissez-faire mean? It's defined as a hands-off approach in economics and leadership that advocates for minimal government intervention or supervision to allow individuals and markets to operate freely, but our government has gone too far. They are allowing individuals and markets to break every conceivable law to line their own pockets: tax evasion, labour and immigration abuse, crime, corruption, and the list goes on.
As a member company of the CTA and the OTA, Spring Creek believes in employee rights and employee standards, and we believe in an environment of fair competition where everyone plays by the same rules. I want to stress that these are not rules that our associations or I have made up. These are rules set out by our government. This committee needs to recommend ways to stop those who don’t believe in these things and to restore law and order to our industry.
This is the tip of the iceberg. We are in crisis, and if nothing is done today, this lawlessness will decimate our industry and this contagious disease will spread out of control throughout all sectors. Our government, I would say, is complicit in this. By not doing anything, by not enforcing your own legislation, you've been saying and are continuing to say that Driver Inc. is okay and that it's acceptable to break the laws of our land.
If the government doesn't do anything, my company will fail. If we fail, it's not because we weren't efficient. It’s not because we were lazy or didn’t work hard. On the contrary, we have been forced to be extremely efficient just to survive to see today. Our business was built on abiding by the laws of the land, with honesty and accountability. This is what our nation was built on, but this new culture of corruption being allowed to proliferate within our industry is what my business and this country will die from.
We need the federal government to get in the game; protect employee rights; help the provinces—and the federal government, for that matter—collect their fair share of income tax, employee health tax, payroll taxes, etc.; follow the recommendations by the CTA report; and rid our industry of the lawlessness that has taken it over.
Thank you very much.