OTTAWA — When Ron Barr, president of the Greater Ottawa Truckers Association (GOTA), was given the list of companies that the city calls on for snow removal, he noticed something “very odd” about the list of 334 companies.

“I discovered that 33 or 34 of those companies — almost 10 percent of the populated list — had homes in Quebec,” he told todaystrucking.com “And I thought this isn’t federal, this isn’t provincial, this is municipal. What’s going on?”

What’s going on, according to Barr, is a seriously uneven playing field between Ontario truckers and Quebec truckers when it comes to working in each other’s provinces, specifically for the City of Ottawa.

“They come over here, they take our work, and then they leave. They don’t buy gas, they don’t employ, and they don’t do the 101 things that an Ontarian would do to benefit the taxbase for Ottawa, which is starving for revenue.”

It’s not as easy for Ontarians to work in Quebec, Barr said, noting fees to join unions, the cost of processing paperwork, and a reported culture of harassment. 

“Going over there we are harassed,” Barr said, anecdotally pointing to members who have been stopped by vehicle inspectors several times in one day and others that have been thrown in jail.

But he doesn’t blame them. “The city of Gatineau is protecting its own and I wish that Ottawa and the province would do the same.”

The first person Barr took his plight to was Ottawa city Councillor Eli El-Chantiry. They had some meetings with senior city staff, and “we kept going back and forth, and we got frustrated, and one day Eli asked ‘Why are we catering to the Quebec companies? We don’t we just not call them?'”

The Discriminatory Business Practices Act prevents discrimination in Ontario on the grounds of geographical location.

That, according to Barr, is the law that the city doesn’t want to push. But “Quebec doesn’t reciprocate,” he says.

Barr then went to the Ontario Ministy Of Labour’s Jobs Protection Office, which handles construction mobility agreements between Quebec and Ontario.

“What they told me is that 32 of the 34 were not registered with the Ministry of Revenue for Ontario. We were just floored by that and we took that to the city,” Barr explained.

The majority of the Quebec based companies have now registered, Barr said, but he maintains that the system is still unfair for Ottawa/Ontario-based companies.

As it stands now, every company on the snow removal list gets a turn. “It’s a wheel. And the wheel consists of, say, 335 businesses, so your second shift will be 336 calls later. Couple of problems: if I’m trying to keep staff, it’s not enough to sustain people, or getting vehicles licensed. We have proposed the list is too bulky,” Barr explains. But that, too, may be changing.

“We went in there to have a discussion with the mayor, and we were told that they are going to a tendering process. I’ve even been put on notice by councilors that if the lowest bid is from Quebec, they’ll get the work,” Barr said.

What Barr would like to see is Ontario businesses come first for the city, “and Quebecers on a secondary list in the case of a major snow event.”

“I wish we were just as diligent and stringent of protecting our own. We’re due diligent of being the good guys.”

For more on the story, check out the Ottawa Citizen here.