The vast majority of B.C. truckers are not protesting.

(CARLI BERRY / iNFOnews.ca)

The Canadian trucking industry was in dire need of an infusion of new blood before a convoy of protesters started across the county in late January and descended on Ottawa two weeks ago.

They rolled through Kamloops Jan. 23 with the stated intent to overturn the vaccine mandate the federal government had imposed on truck drivers crossing into the United States.

READ MORE: UPDATE: Hundreds gather for trucker ‘Freedom Convoy’ protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates in Kamloops, Salmon Arm

That soon turned to a much broader movement with many more groups than just truckers fighting against all kinds of COVID restrictions and, for some, looking to overturn the Liberal government in the process.

Its most visible aspects, of course, still are the massive trucks and trailers that were the initial focus of the protest movement.

READ MORE: Once opponents, these two Kelowna politicians are together on ending vaccine mandates

“The biggest thing that is impacting the industry is not the vaccine mandate, it’s the labour shortage,” Dave Earle, president of the B.C Trucking Association told iNFOnews.ca. “We know it’s an aging workforce. We know we’re seeing fewer and fewer people entering the industry. We’re not keeping up.”

There are currently 4,000 to 5,000 truck driving vacancies in B.C. so, any international driver who didn’t want to get vaccinated would have no problem finding work in Canada.

The B.C. association lost about 10% of its drivers to retirement during the COVID pandemic. Efforts to recruit new drivers included getting more women behind the wheel. While only about five per cent of drivers in B.C. are women, new training courses were seeing 12% to 15% of entrants being women.

The industry had launched a national campaign to promote trucking as a viable and attractive vocation.

“It got underway the week the protest started,” Earle said. “It was very targeted and very thoughtful. It was a pilot and we were doing some interesting work right across the country. But, it attracted such unbelievable negativity on social media that we had to pull the whole thing and put it under a tent until we get past this crisis.”

And therein lies the problem for an industry desperately needing to make itself attractive to new employees in order to move vital goods around the country.

“It’s not that goods won’t get there,” Earle said. “They’ll always get there. They just may not get there as quickly as you want. For you and I ,having to wait two extra days for an Amazon parcel or something to come in the mail, ya, whatever. For a construction project waiting for a critical piece of machinery to get there and it’s five days late, that’s a problem.”

He’s afraid that the protest rally is so focused on truckers that it’s giving the whole industry a bad name, pointing out there are close to 400,000 tractor trailer drivers in the country and only a few hundred protesting. On the other hand, Earle said, there are people saying the protests will attract more people to the industry because the truckers involved there say they are standing up for freedom.

“As its changing and as the tenor of it’s changing, we’re hopeful the public will continue to understand that 85, 90% of drivers are vaccinated,” Earle said. “The vast majority of the industry, just as the vast majority of the population, is in compliance and is just working as we do. As with any group of people, you will have some in there with divergent points of view. It’s difficult and we’re concerned but we recognize this is a protest, It’s not just or only about trucking. There’s a lot of other parties in there and that’s something we’re confident the public will understand that this isn’t just trucks.”

Part of the problem is the simple size of the equipment being used in this protest.

“The thing is, the stuff is so big,” Earle said. “If you get half-a-dozen of these trucks, they can shut down any road in Canada.”

What concerns him is what happens when this is all over.

“This gets back to the politics of division,” Earle said. “For whatever reason, there’s a lot of people who don’t feel heard so here we are. The bigger question, I think all of us are thinking about as we come out of this is, how do we rebuild? How do we engage in a civil society? How do we avoid the polarization? How do we do that in a world of alternative facts, social media? I don’t know that any country has really figured it out but this is something I’m really, really eager to start trying to work on, on how do we do this?”

Right now, it seems, people are just yelling at each other.

“It’s going to be critical that we come out of it with a degree of civility and understanding and not just dogmatic positions where we just yell at each other,” Earle said. “That’s not going to work.”

Oh, and that vaccine mandate?

What many don’t realize is that the U.S. also requires people driving into their country to be vaccinated or go into quarantine. But, it doesn’t apply to Americans.

What this means is, if the Canadian government were to lift its vaccine mandate, unvaccinated Canadian drivers still would not be able to go into the U.S. But, American drivers would be free to come to Canada and take those jobs away from Canadians, he said.

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