VANCOUVER, (July 27, 2004) — Try to account for the driver shortage in Western Canada these days and you’ll get a range of answers — from the cost of insurance to a pool of uninterested young workers.

But Jim Mickey, president and co-owner of Coastal Pacific Xpress in Vancouver, sees another reason. The profile of your average truck driver — a semi-skilled person with an independent streak — is strikingly similar to someone working in the construction trades.

The differences, though, are time and money. “A job that pays $15 an hour for a 40-hour week is a better deal than what a long-haul driver can get after you factor in all the non-compensable time like border delays, loading and unloading delays, not to mention the lack of respect and the grief that comes with the profession,” Mickey says.

Indeed, long-haul drivers are trading their sleeper cabs for dump boxes or abandoning the trucking industry altogether to work as tradespeople in British Columbia’s thriving building industry.

The housing market is hot all over the country, but the push to quickly build facilities for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics is the most direct explanation for the local construction boom. Apparently some of the 228,000 new jobs the games are expected to provide are actually old jobs from the over-the-road trucking industry.

“I just had one of my top drivers give me notice,” Bob Simpson, president of container hauler Team Transport Services of Richmond, B.C., told Today’s Trucking. “For a local truck working within the port, an average day is six moves — legs, not round trips. Right now that’s reduced to five and four because of congestion and volume. Combine those losses with rising fuel costs and it’s killing these guys. So they go into construction where they’re getting paid more to basically just sit there.”

Others aren’t so quick to blame construction for leeching away drivers and owner-operators. “It’s changing demographics,” says Steve Islaub, vice-president of operations for Vedder Transport in Abbotsford, B.C. “I’ve got several guys who are going to be retiring within the next five years. The old ones are going out, but the young ones aren’t coming in.”

That leads to the one point virtually all agree on: fewer young drivers would jump off the highway to sit in a pit if wages were higher and they were home with their families more often.

“There’s been a shift in values,” says Islaub. “There’s not so many people who want to be away from home for so long anymore.”

— with files from David Kosub