CBC runs infomercial, pretends it's news

Check out the latest iteration of this same-old story at CBC; A 'demographic tsunami' is about to make Canada's trucker shortage even worse.

That reads a lot like an infomercial for the Ontario Truck Driving School to my eye. That's an outfit that lures gullible young (and not so young) people, quite often recent immigrants, into its driver training programs, from which, after dropping eight to ten thousand dollars in tuition and other fees, they graduate into a poorly paid job with long hours and zero work-life balance.

Sure there are drivers making $70,000/year, but they more or less have to live in their rigs to do that. And forget about the Ontario Trucking Association doing anything about it. They're the employer lobby group largely responsible for turning truck-driving into a shit job in the first place.

The OTA figures the solution lies in bringing in foreign workers. That's a strategy premised on the belief that somewhere in the world, in some refugee camp in some shithole country we've destroyed, there must be folks desperate enough that a shitty job in Canada looks like manna from heaven.

It's a time-tested strategy. Look what happened in the meat-packing industry. Canadian icon Peter Pocklington led the charge with his lock-out of Gainers workers in '86. He generously offered his unionized workforce a 45% reduction in pay. Before that, meat-packing plants offered hard and unpleasant work at a decent wage. A job in a packing plant offered an opportunity to buy a home and educate your children.

After that, not so much. It didn't take long till most meat-packing jobs went to foreign workers willing to "do the jobs Canadians didn't want to do."

Of course they did! If you're starving to death in a refugee camp in Somalia, a slaughterhouse job at ten cents over minimum wage in Alberta looks like a pretty good deal. To this day, the backbone of the meat-packing industry workforce is made up of foreign workers.

It's a strategy that solved the labour shortage in meat-packing. There's no reason to think it won't solve the truck-driver shortage too.

The question should be, is this a strategy that's good for Canadian workers, or is it a strategy that benefits only company owners, at the expense of Canadian workers?