OTTAWA — When truckers manage to get the ear of some of Canada’s top decision makers, they might as well keep talking for as long a they can.

After addressing a finance committee on incentives and tax breaks for clean truck engine technology, representatives of the Canadian Trucking Alliance remain in Ottawa to try and make politicians understand the daily grind involved in crossing the border.

In an appearance at a meeting of the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, CTA senior VP Graham Cooper cautioned that land transportation security programs, particularly at the Canada-U.S. border, continue to result in duplication, overlap and ever-increasing costs for carriers.

CTA says Canadian and US Customs need to
refocus inspections to where they’ll truly needed.

“Like the exporters whose goods we carry, the trucking industry is unsettled by the fact that the cost of moving goods continues to be driven up by security measures that are rolled out and evaluated in isolation from one another. The big picture — an appropriate balance between security and trade efficiency — seems to have been lost,” said Cooper.

He acknowledged that a measure of enhanced security at the border is inevitable in a post Sept. 11 environment. In fact, he adds, more than 70,000 participants are signed up for FAST and thousands more are dutifully supplying advance cargo and conveyance data to US Customs and Border Protection.

However, it’s becoming apparent, adds Cooper, that Canada and the U.S. have created an array of programs that “don’t always dovetail with one another, and the situation seems to be getting worse.”

“The reality is that the trucking industry today faces a range of mode-specific requirements, facility-specific requirements, and even commodity-specific requirements coming at us from departments and agencies on both sides of the border. The situation is not sustainable. We can’t go on forever, layering one new program on top of another, further driving up the cost of transportation and harming Canadian competitiveness.”

There is of course no silver bullet to address these problems, says cooper, but added that government agencies on both sides of the border must remember that the appropriate balance between efficient trade flow and enhanced security can be achieved only if risks are properly assessed.

“The focus on risk is absolutely fundamental,” he said. “Our view is that a proper assessment of risk creates a win-win scenario for the trucking industry and government: for us, in ensuring that inspections and programs are targeted to where they are really needed; and for government, in ensuring that scarce resources are applied where they will do most good.”