Don’t go there

What would happen if a couple of angry truckers decided they’d had enough border-crossing crap and decided to block Detroit-bound access to the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ont.? It would take only a couple of guys to start it. The bridge would close and 8 per cent of our country’s total gross domestic product would stop dead. That’s how much freight crosses the border at this particular spot.

I’m not advocating such action. Far from it. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see it. The congestion is killing those parts of our industry that rely on international freight. Eventually, drivers just won’t go.

The problem is there’s nobody to flip a switch and make things right at the bridge. There’s no obvious movement on the part of the politicians and bureaucrats who control the situation. While truckers face new rules in the name of homeland security, the folks who sit on one commission or another seem to finish their 35-hour weeks without advancing the cause of a streamlined, more efficient border one inch.

How could they? They have no clue about what it’s like to be a paid-by-the-mile driver stuck in a line for hours at a time. They don’t understand the frustration–and the threat to business–felt by the fleet owners whose drivers don’t want

Some of those suits should ride shotgun in a border-bound truck, inching forward while their bladders fill and their blood pressures rise. I want them to come face to face–smiling–with a surly U.S. Customs inspector who figures every Canadian truck is hauling a nuclear weapon destined for Disneyland. I want them to struggle to be civil while the 40-watt bulb with the uniform and the gun makes them dance a paperwork jig just because he likes that feeling of control.

“I’ve never seen the industry in such chaos,” a veteran owner-operator told me a while back. “This border’s killing us.”

He was talking about the bridge crossings in both Windsor and Sarnia, where truck lineups can be over 10 kilometres long. Even at the relatively quiet Thousand Island Bridge from Lansdowne, Ont., to Alexandria Bay in New York state, I’ve seen trucks backed up onto Hwy. 401. That’s at least 10 clicks.

The owner-operator said he’s tired of waiting in line five or six hours to get rubber-stamped by a U.S. Customs guy who may be the only one on duty in spite of a huge line of truckers approaching. “It’s wasting us a trip every week,” he went on. “If I could do three Chicago runs in a week before, now I can do just two.”

I’ve heard fleet owners with similar complaints. But it’s the shippers who’ll catch the ear of the folks who are in a position to do something. And now, amid an Orange Alert from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, they’re bitching, too, because they want their plants to stay open. As DaimlerChrysler Canada president Ed Brust said recently, “The border cannot continue to be an uncertainty.” He knows the Windsor/Detroit crossing carries some 1,400 trailer-loads of parts every day from Michigan to Windsor, a freight flow that keeps his assembly plants rolling. “Doing nothing is not a solution,” Brust said.

Yet nothing is all that’s being done in Windsor. A couple of FAST (Free and Secure Trade) lanes here and there won’t make the difference. More bridge or tunnel capacity is at least eight years away. In the short term, we need a way to clear customs long before trucks get to Windsor, and then stage them through the city and onto the bridge. What we need is for this industry to get up in arms and demand that somebody fix it. We’ve been waiting too long already.