Border traffic symptom of slowing economy: OTA

TORONTO — Cross-border truck trips between Ontario and the U.S. have fallen to the lowest level in a decade.

Bridge and Tunnel Operator’s Association, there were 8,049,136 truck trips across the Ontario-US border in 2007, down from 8,267,931 trips in 2006, a decrease of 2.6 percent and the lowest level since 1998. That’s 72,000 trips less than 2001, when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 brought border traffic to a standstill for the fourth quarter of the year.

Ontario Trucking Association President David Bradley said the numbers are “clear and unequivocal evidence of the extent to which Ontario’s export based economy has been battered by the combination of a high dollar, high fuel costs, the ever-increasing thickening of the border, and slackening U.S. demand.”

Even Sept. 11 couldn’t slow down cross border truck
trips as much as the industry experienced in 2007.

“Trucking activity is a leading economic indicator, and these numbers should be a wake up call to governments at all levels that there is a very real need for them to act now to help Ontario’s economy cope with the challenges currently confronting it,” Bradley said.

As a remedy, Bradley called on the Bank of Canada to aggressively reduce interest rates in Canada in order to spur economic growth and to moderate the value of the dollar.

Also, despite the investment of millions of dollars trucking carriers have made in new security measures supposedly designed to facilitate legitimate trade, “wait times at the border have not come down, and in many cases we are still subject to frequent, long delays.”

Bradley said he’s also frustrated by the delays in selecting the location for a new international bridge at the Windsor-Detroit gateway. “We need better infrastructure and we need governments on both sides of the border to get serious about coordinating, harmonizing and improving the delivery of border security programs so that both security and trade facilitation goals are met,” he said.

However, the numbers could embolden opponents of a new bridge. The owners of the privately owned Ambassador Bridge, for example, have been arguing that a second crossing downriver is unnecessary and a new twin span being constructed by the company would have enough capacity to handle future traffic projections.

Bradley points out that Ontario’s manufacturing and retail sectors are calling for more productive trucks, such as long combination vehicles, presently utilized in most other Canadian provinces and about half the US states. “If Ontario, indeed if North America is going to compete with the emerging economies, we are not going to do it by lowering wages to third world levels. We’re going to have to be smarter,” Bradley concluded.