Time’s Up

To laugh or to cry: that’s where I’m at right now with Canada’s new hours of service rules. They’ve been at it more than 12 years now, and with literally a few weeks left until they were to come into force, four provinces announce that they won’t be ready to go on January 1. And one of them has said it won’t be following the federal plan when they do come into effect.

Quebec, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Alberta have all declared they won’t meet the deadline.

New Brunswick has just been through a provincial election, and the new cabinet needs a little time to get its legislative agenda sorted out. They could be forgiven for that, I suppose. For Saskatchewan, I’m told, it’s just a matter of timing. They intend to adopt the federal rule by reference, but haven’t been able to get it done yet. I wasn’t able to get a reason why Quebec won’t be ready by January, and I’m not about to speculate.

Alberta is another story.

With that province in the midst of a provincial party-leadership race, Transport Minster, Ty Lund, pulled the plug on 12 years’ work, saying, “The province encourages a collaborative approach to developing government policy and regulations. To ensure proposed changes to Alberta’s commercial hours of service regulation meet the need to manage driver fatigue and the operational needs of operators, additional consultation with industry is necessary.”

Lund was appointed in April 2006, and brings less than seven month’s experience to the portfolio — and to the HOS discussion.

Former Transport Minister, Dr. Lyle Oberg, was ousted from cabinet in March after suggesting his constituents withhold their support for Ralph Klein at an upcoming party leadership bid. He’s currently after King Klein’s old job.

Excuse me, Mr. Lund, but what the heck do you think you’re doing?

Twelve years into a process that will lead to one of the most dramatic changes in the way trucking does ­business isn’t the time to be playing politics — but I guess to fellows like Lund, politics is the game and the process. Nothing else matters.

The Alberta PC party is in the midst of a leadership race, and there are people in the Alberta resource sector that are mighty unhappy about the prospect of applying weekly caps to driver hours. None exist presently, making it possible for intra-provincial drivers to work up to 105 hours per week. Imagine what will happen to capacity in that sector when the weekly driving-hour limits are cut by 35 hours?

It came to light on November 9 that four provinces wouldn’t be ready by New Year’s, and it was suggested then that the rest of the provinces delay implementation of their rules until April 1. The federal rule cannot be changed without going back to Canada Gazette, and to do that would mean a delay of many months. That’s out of the question.

But the federal rule is less important in this context than the provincial rules. The cops enforce the provincial rules, not the federal, so even if the federal rule is “in force” on January 1, the provinces aren’t obliged to roll theirs out on the same day. Things would be simpler if they did, but we’re talking Canada here.

So it looks like we’ll have six provinces and the territories ready to go on January 1, but not the other four. How then do we enforce the HOS rules? We can’t have certain provinces on the new and the rest working with the old. That could create huge inequities — given the more restrictive nature of the new rules.

For competitive reasons, we can’t have some carriers voluntarily adopting the new rules, while some would choose to stick with the old.

Regulators have a couple of conference calls scheduled in the days to come — after we’ve gone to press — so the eventual outcome may be known by the time you read this. At least I certainly hope it is.

But from what I’ve heard, it’ll be April 1 before the provinces start watching for signs of compliance with the new rule, and they’ll extend a period of soft, or educational, enforcement until June 30, with the full and final implementation of the rules set for July 1.

Were it up to me, I’d write the regulators a big fat ticket for botching the roll-out of these rules — and I’d put Ty Lund out-of-service for 72 hours for his stunt. After 12 years, you’d think they’d have more of this stuff worked out.