Transport committee  Just quickly, labour believes in a just transition. We don't think workers should find themselves without work as a result of transitioning, but we do have a climate crisis. When workers are taken into consideration by government programs for greening the economy, everyone wins.

Transport committee  I think it's probably a bit of everything. When you work in the labour movement, you know that you get the answers by asking workers what they think. That's what we did, and they're telling us that these are the things that are keeping new workers from coming in. These are the

Transport committee  As a company, Uber does not necessarily have the best reputation for job quality and staff retention. Some companies don’t use the same model as Uber, but they violate workers’ rights, exploit them and want to get the most profit out of them, at the expense of their well-being.

Transport committee  Again, a trend we're seeing a lot is that newer workers want something different out of their work. They want more work-life balance. That's something we hear a lot. My colleague, John McCann, was telling a story about someone he knew who had started truck-driving, then realize

Transport committee  I think you hit the nail on the head. Good working standards will attract more people. If the salaries are higher, and if people feel like it's a good way to support their families and it's worth the sacrifice of perhaps being away from home, they will come more readily if those

Transport committee  We also feel that appropriate training, such as by recognizing truck drivers as a skilled trade in which they would have onboarding and training in order to be safer drivers, would be a good thing. As I mentioned, there was even a case in Quebec where people were selling fake lic

Transport committee  A lot of it is federal jurisdiction. I'll ask my colleague, Mariam, if she has any comments on issues in the rail sector regarding safety.

Transport committee  You said EV. I assume you meant AI, as in driverless trucks?

Transport committee  We have a lot of questions about safety, and we kind of feel the same way. I don't think the technology is quite there yet. An analogy that is sometimes made is that for a long time we thought we could have planes that could fly without a pilot, but I think most people would feel

Transport committee  You are absolutely right. That would be the case for any measure that helps to reduce fatigue. I mentioned the lack of truck stops. Truck drivers often tell us that they have to extend their trip, and that means skipping meals or rest. That really generates frustration and fatig

Transport committee  To get a good perspective on that.... I've never worked in the rail sector, and I'm only starting to hear more and more stories. When I started, I asked if I could go on site and ride the train with one of the Teamster members, and I was told no, because the risk to my personal s

Transport committee  That's a good question. I don't know if my colleague, Mariam, has any thoughts on that.

Transport committee  The number of vacancies in the trucking industry is the problem we’ve been talking about the longest. As I said, a labour shortage was predicted as far back as 2013, when the report by the Conference Board of Canada came out. That was before the pandemic and the supply chain cris

Transport committee  Are you talking about trains or trucks?

Transport committee  It’s hard to say. We haven’t studied vacancies in the rail sector as closely. Right now, we are focusing more on the crisis in the trucking sector. As noted earlier, Statistics Canada publishes numbers every quarter. The last time I checked, there were approximately 26,000 vaca