Driver misclassification, an ongoing glut of capacity putting downward pressure on freight rates, cross-border trade and road safety in Ontario were some of the topics covered by a panel of Ontario trucking heavy hitters at this week’s Ontario Trucking Association (OTA) annual executive conference.
The panel was made up of Avery Vise, vice-president of trucking with industry forecaster FTR, David Tumber, president of Kriska Transportation Group, Newly elected OTA chairman Mark Bylsma, president of Spring Creek Carriers, Ron Uloth, vice-president of the Rosedale Group, and Mark Knott, vice-president, central region operations for Fastfrate. The conversation was moderated by Today’s Trucking and Trucknews.com’s James Menzies. Parent company, Newcom, sponsored the session.
Bylsma noted off the bat the current freight market for responsible, law abiding carriers is highly affected by the underground economy and non-compliant companies left unchecked by government. He urged everyone in the jam-pecked room to contact their government representatives to demand action.
“We’re very good at lobbying and we’re good at policy, but we – the people in this room and out in the hallways – need to get together and have a grassroots political effort in a coordinated and collaborative way.”
Menzies reported many of the highlights of the event in Trucknews.com:
Avery Vise, visiting from the U.S., shared insights into the current freight market. While he said the market should improve slightly in the coming year, don’t expect drastic changes as there remains too much capacity and stagnant freight growth. The consumer economy, he added, has little room for growth as it and employment are already strong.
“You can’t have a recovery just from capacity [leaving],” Vise said. “Even if capacity were to go away, you have to have freight growth to some degree.”
Asked why capacity has been slow to exit the market, he said “We had an unimaginable amount of stimulus [during Covid], which also went to people who decided to leave their jobs as truck drivers and get their own authority, creating a surge in new authorities that we’ve never seen before.”
David Tumber provided a fleet perspective from the front lines. “We feel like we’re kind of bouncing around the bottom and we have for a few months now,” he said.
That has come amid a sharp increase in operating costs.
“I think across the board, our businesses have seen single-digit rate deflation but double-digit cost appreciation on our cap-ex side,” he said.
Kriska has responded by putting a pause on company acquisitions and scrutinizing how it deploys capital.
elected OTA chairman Mark Bylsma, noted being a small carrier in this environment may allow for increased agility, but also presents more exposure to the volatile spot market. His company is struggling with an imbalance of loads and rates going across the border.
“Right now, southbound to the U.S., the volumes are there,” he said. “We’re happy with those volumes. But northbound coming back from the U.S. is a completely different story. So now you’ve got trucks that are going out full with yesterday’s rates and trucks that are coming inbound and they’re even worse than yesterday’s rates. That’s where we’re at.”
A bright spot in the Canadian trucking landscape has been intermodal, noted Mark Knott. Shippers have been shifting more freight to intermodal primarily due to the potential cost savings, and not necessarily the related emissions reductions, he noted.
Ron Uloth said his business is focused on the variables it can control. It has better utilized telematics to improve customer service, while focusing on driver retention.
“There are things we can control and we do that on a daily basis,” he said. “We can control our warehouse hours, we can control our driver hours, we can control the payload on our trucks. We can also control our empty miles. We can pay attention to delay times on pickups and deliveries, and idle time. That’s one area that we’ve really focused on and we’ve had some substantial saving.”
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