Immigrant Workers Are an Integral Part of the Canadian
Working Class
- Normand Chouinard -
In recent decades, particularly since the introduction
of
new neo-liberal arrangements and the globalization that has
followed, the trucking industry has grown exponentially and now
requires a large number of skilled workers. There are currently
3.5 million truckers in the United States and almost 200,000 in
Canada, which is a considerable force within the working class.
The free trade agreement between Canada and the United States
adopted under Brian Mulroney's government in October 1987 and the
Canada-United States-Mexico (NAFTA) agreement in March 1994
favoured the rapid integration of the Canadian economy to that of
the U.S. Trade has progressively moved from the East-West
axis to the North-South axis. The number of transportation
companies that work across the border is significantly higher
than those that are interprovincial, which is a clear indicator
of the continued integration of the Canadian economy into the
United States of North American Monopolies. In Canada, in the
1990s, the transportation industry was targeted for a series of
deregulations aimed at making truck transportation more fluid and
eliminating "paperwork." The direct consequence of this massive
deregulation has been a deterioration in the working
conditions and wages of Canadian truckers that has continued
throughout the 2000s to the present day.
Talk of a labour shortage in the transport sector began
in the
early 2000s. The deterioration of the living and working
conditions of truckers has had a real impact on the work force,
which steadily decreased. Coupled with this is a growing need for
new truckers to serve the needs of the monopolies, which together
create the situation of "scarcity" of manpower.
As a result, the federal government has introduced
programs to
hire newcomers to this sector (as in all other sectors). Today,
one out of every four truckers is a recent immigrant, half of
whom come from India, particularly from the state of Punjab.
According to the trucking industry magazine Today's Trucking,
which conducted a study on these issues, twenty years ago only
1.8 per cent of truckers came from South Asia and most resided in the
Vancouver area of British Columbia. They accounted for 18.7 per cent of
the city's drivers, compared to 6.2 per cent for the Toronto area. By
2016, approximately one in five truckers (17.8 per cent) were of South
Asian origin. In British Columbia, one in three truckers, 34.6 per
cent,
came from this region and one in four (25.6 per cent) in Ontario. In
the
two major cities of Vancouver and Toronto, South Asian truckers
now represent 55.9 per cent and 53.9 per cent of all drivers in the
industry,
respectively.
An interesting statistic shows that of the 181,330
Canadian
truck drivers listed in 2016, there are 58,985 whose birthplace
is outside of Canada. In 1991, 7.7 per cent of drivers were immigrants,
compared to 32.5 per cent in 2016.
Recently, the Canadian Trucking Alliance and the Quebec
Trucking Association (ACQ), representing the major Canadian and
Quebec transportation companies, called for the federal
government to relax the rules of the Temporary Foreign Worker
Program (TFWP) and open up new opportunities for transport employers,
claiming that this was required to meet the manpower needs caused
by the shortage of drivers.
British Columbia has the highest number of drivers in
the TFWP, 934 in 2017, followed by Quebec with 166 and New
Brunswick with 108. According to the changes made by the Harper
government in 2014, companies wishing to use the TFWP must follow the
Labor Market Impact
Assessment (LMIA) procedure, a procedure to prove that attempts
to find Canadian workers have all been exhausted. The TFWP has a strong
presence in other sectors of
the economy, including agriculture and agri-food, but is only
just beginning in the transportation sector. The reason is that
the truck driving job requires a certain level of training and
job skills before a driver can drive on the Canadian road
network. It is one of the major demands of truckers, in their
application for recognition of their trade by the federal
government, that throughout the country new drivers be provided
with full training.
Transport Minister Marc Garneau announced on January 21
that
his government is committed to a national standard for basic
training for commercial vehicles by 2020, but that its
application will depend on the provinces to make it mandatory,
that it will be the provinces that will set the standards and
issue permits based on the new national standards. Currently only
Ontario requires a minimum of 101.5 hours of mandatory training
for new drivers. Garneau's decision comes after the reports of the
investigation into the Humboldt tragedy, an accident involving a heavy
vehicle which caused the deaths of a number of young hockey players in
Saskatchewan, were released and these
findings were the basis for his recommendation. "Canadians expect that
people who receive their licences, as drivers of semi-trailers -- large
vehicles -- should be properly prepared
through training before they assume those duties," said the
Minister of Transport at the annual meeting of the ministers of
transport and road safety held on January 21 in Montreal. As for
the Canadian Trucking Alliance, its President, Scott Smith, is
satisfied with this new harmonization of federal standards and
provincial application. "This announcement is an excellent
example of joint industry and government work toward achieving
positive results." The Quebec trucking association is moving in
the same direction despite a different situation in Quebec where,
although not mandatory, 615 hours of public training is available
for new drivers.
Although at first glance this development seems positive
for
truckers, they are entitled to wonder whether it is connected in
any way with the expansion of the TFWP requested by the monopolies and
to be wary that this will
have the effect of increasing the competition between truckers so
as to block their demands for improvement of their living
conditions and their wages, tantamount to a new deregulation
without really being called that. Canadian and Quebec truckers
who have struggled for years to remedy the last decades of
deregulation by demanding that they receive more of the added
value that they produce will not let their conditions worsen so
easily. They recognize that recent immigrants or workers who come
to Canada as temporary foreign workers are an integral part of
the working class in Canada and Quebec and that the defence of
the rights of all is the sine qua non
condition of their victory.
Any attempt to divide them between "them" and "us" will be fought
hard and is doomed to fail.
March 21 marks the fifth anniversary of the Vancouver
truckers' strike in which 500 Unifor union truckers united with
the 1,500 truckers who are members of the United Truckers Association,
workers of Punjab origin. Together, they
defeated the Vancouver Port Authority, the Christy Clark
government in British Columbia and the federal government of
Stephen Harper and his infamous Minister of Transport Lisa Raitt.
It was a great victory for Canadian truckers and today, in the
context of a new offensive whereby migrant or foreign workers are
hired with the aim of increasing the exploitation of truckers and
preventing a new direction for the industry, the way forward for
the workers is to defend the rights of all truckers in Canada,
regardless of their national origin.
Vancouver truckers' strike, March 21, 2014.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number
15 - April 27, 2019
Article Link:
Immigrant
Workers
Are
an Integral Part of the Canadian Working Class
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
|
