Driver’s Side: The Ottawa Citizen missed a great story in asking all the wrong questions

Trucking has a problem. With the thrashing we took at the hands of the Ottawa Citizen over a two-week period in June, you’d think somebody on our side might have bothered to respond. I’ve heard little in the way of a comeback, save for a few letters to the editor.

I would have hoped the industry might have stepped up to the plate in the defence of truck drivers.

In case you haven’t heard, and most of you likely haven’t, the newspaper ran a series of 22 horribly biased stories about all the evil that trucks and truck drivers do. The writers dug up the usual dirt on logbook violations, unsafe trucks, and defective brakes. But they didn’t dig deeper than the obvious stuff.

I don’t know about you, but while I was driving I took those attacks very personally. They hit me right where I lived. For a while after one of those stories ran, I always felt that everyone I met had seen those stories and was wondering if I was like those truckers they had read about in the newspaper.

What really hurt, once, was when my daughter came home from school and asked me if I was like the truckers her teacher talked about in class. And the teacher wasn’t being complimentary. How the heck am I supposed to respond to something like that?

It would be nice, though, if the industry we work for thought enough of drivers, and the hard work we do, to show some support by defending us in the face of such humiliating commentary. I really felt the Citizen’s writers were trying to lay an inappropriate amount of blame on drivers themselves. They seemed to be suggesting that most of us have little more in the way of a conscience than does a box of hammers. They were hitting pretty close to the bone.

I guess where the rubber meets the road, anybody can say it’s ultimately the driver’s decision to break the rules, maybe to let the brakes go unchecked. I guess it’s easier to suggest that greedy drivers are responsible for killing innocent motorists than it would be to explain why those same drivers routinely give up 20 hours or more every week waiting around to ensure their loads are picked up and delivered on time. I guess greedy drivers are easier to explain than how logging off-duty frees drivers up to work all night after spending an unpaid day at a shipper’s dock.

The Citizen series, as far as it went, was actually based mostly in fact. The authors didn’t do us any favors in terms of showing the positive side Ð they just didn’t show it at all — but here’s what their work did for me. It reminded me that if you’re not working to fix this mess, then you’re more than partly to blame for making it even messier.

Every time you walk a pile of papers from customs broker to customs broker after the shipper was supposed to have made all the arrangements, you’re just making the problem invisible. You’re willingly taking on the shipper’s job, covering up their mistake, and you’re doing it at your own expense. So don’t come crying to me when the boss won’t pay you for the time. Next time, just go to bed; deal with it in the morning. If it’s the shipper’s fault, the shipper can deal with the consequences. Why should you worry about it?

Then there are the Wal-Marts of the world. Where do they get off charging a carrier, who occasionally passes the charge down to the driver, for a missed delivery appointment? Think a thousand-dollar fine isn’t a strong incentive to run the extra miles when you’re tired? Damn right it is.

That brings me around to the final point in this diatribe. For all the questions the two reporters asked, the one they never asked was ‘why?’

The cornerstones of a reporter’s trade are the five Ws: Who, What, When, Where and Why. The Citizen writers got lots of mileage out of the first four but left out the fifth and, in my opinion, most important question. If you understand ‘why’, the rest becomes a little clearer.

But let’s face it, the “why” of a driver violating the hours-of-service regulations is a lot easier to explain than why a piecework, pay-by-the-mile policy ever came into being in the first place. How about asking why exemption from overtime pay for truckers got started; or why drivers are held accountable for brake adjustment; or why drivers won’t slow down to save fuel costs; or why drivers won’t recognize the value of what they do for a living and start trying to exert a little pressure on the consumer to pay for all the time spent on the job.

Having some of these questions answered would have taken a great deal of effort, because they’d have to find somebody near the top to address the issues. They’re the kind of questions that are more difficult to explain than the obvious ones the Citizen reporters chose to exploit.

Had they bothered to ask why, these two reporters would have found themselves a much more interesting story.