LAVAL, Que. — The chief executive officer of one of Canada’s largest fleets says he is confident about his company’s prospects in the next few months.

“We have a rock-solid company,” says Alain Bedard, who is also the president of TransForce, at the company’s annual meeting yesterday.

Bedard shrugged off the doubts raised by all too common shouts of recession, as well as the company’s relatively high debt load and highly paid workforce to say nothing of problems created by recent delays at the Canada-U.S. border.

He said his company is better positioned than other trucking companies to withstand the effects of a prolonged recession because it began planning for a slowdown last fall.

“At TransForce, we foresaw that [slowdown],” he said. “We knew that someday it would start to rain.”

The company earned net income of $4.1-million on sales of $108.6-million in the first quarter ended July 21, up from profit of $3.1-million and sales of $106.6-million for the comparable period last year.