Listen to the experts…

Especially doctoral students in the medical field when they weigh in on the subject of  supply chain logistics and commercial trucking.

But if data indicates that truck drivers are a significant source of virus importation, it might make sense to have handovers of freight at the border so the drivers themselves don’t cross over, said McLaughlin.

There are likely some SDA readers out there with experience in the trucking industry who can elaborate on the nightmarish scenarios that might unfold should anyone should actually try what Ms. McLaughlin is recommending.

63 Replies to “Listen to the experts…”

  1. She’s a frigging doctoral student in BC!!! She doesn’t have the faintest understanding of economics, business, logistics, or anything else in the real world. How the F do these people get their sH&t published?

      1. Yes vowg, but the problem is they think they have a superior intellect, don’t they.

  2. Because they are “woke” lefties. If you are a sane, rational, common sense individual without that “oh so important ” University degree you would never get your ideas published.
    Whats her “doctoral” degree in? ARTS?

    1. She doesn’t yet have a degree. She’s a student, and not a very good one it seems.

      1. She has 2 degrees, but none of them are likely in anything approaching logistics….

        she’s Educated… not learned.

  3. How much more likeable life would be without government financing such drivel. Nothing like 8 million people crowded in the gta to spread diseases.

  4. My daily freight from Edmonton to east Central Alberta is handed over 3 times. This isn’t rocket appliances people, it’s actually pretty simple.

    1. Pretty simple, eh?

      “More than a quarter of the $700-billion annual trade between our two nations (US & Canada) crosses here (Ambassador Bridge, Detroit-Windsor) —between 8,000 and 10,000 trucks every day.”

      https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/land-of-the-freeloaders-the-battle-for-a-new-cross-border-bridge/

      Imagine the number of forklifts, pallet-jacks, loading docks, warehouse space, and above all, people required to transfer loads. Plus however many thousand extra trucks.

      That’s just one border crossing. Now do the other 29.

      1. You could just trade the trailers from an American truck driver to a Canadian truck driver..

        BUT…

        The logistics of arranging that are enormous. See below for a comment by “Davis” who knows what he is talking about. He will describe that there are nowhere near enough truck drivers to accomplish such a thing…

        1. Would a Transport company want to buy a set of nice new trailers and have them exchanged at the border (either direction) for some junky one that has a million miles under it’s wheels? So first, we need an intermediate trailer owning company that rents it trailers north and south, to travel in all the states and provinces with all the differing regulations, insurance, and safety concerns. So, can we get the new trailer company set up first? We’ll wait…………………. Chris you’re right, a logistical nightmare that even the military couldn’t solve easily, but a grad student can, cuz she’s “educated”, as said above, an educated idiot is still an idiot.

  5. Living Windsor it would be a nightmare. First every car assembly plant in North America would be shutdown. Canadians would have a very hardtime with getting fruits and vegetables. That is just for starters. People just don’t understand the volumes we are talking about and is just Windsor Detroit. There is not enough drivers and power units to be able to do the switch in Canada. The added costs would astronomical. Add a hundred dollars to grocery bill. Damn Liberal may just do it. As an aside it my company would be bankrupted.

    1. Had wondered about the logistics of having a couple of large yards at the border. One would have the northbound trailers dropped off by American drivers and picked up by Canadian ones. The other would have southbound trailers similarly dropped off by Canadian drivers and picked up by American ones. But you say that wouldn’t work.

      1. 8,000 to 10,000 trucks cross the Ambassador bridge EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. (Detroit-Windsor) I will leave it to your imagination how much space, equipment, and physically-distanced employees would be required to accomplish this task.

        1. I used to live in Windsor. There’s a huge bonding lot just a few clicks down the highway from the Bridge. Northbound truck crosses the bridge, goes to the bonding lot, disengages from its trailer, picks up a southbound trailer, hitches up, and goes back over the bridge. Canadian trucks drop their loads at the lot, pick up the northbound trailers, finish the route. Yep, someone would need to write an app to manage it. That’s do-able. All it takes is will.

          Also, 8,000 trucks a day is a truck every 12 seconds. I used to live in Windsor and work in Detroit. Took the bridge or tunnel every day. No way a truck comes through every 12 seconds. Maybe you are counting two way traffic, in which case there are only 4,000 trucks a day coming in and 4,000 coming out. That’s still a truck every 24 seconds coming into Canada, and I have never seen them processed that quickly.

          You keep saying “It’s impossible”, but all those trucks cross the bridge every day as it is. What I’d like to hear from you is EXACTLY why it’s impossible, more than just a bald assertion that it is. I’ve seen big rigs disengage from a trailer in ten minutes, and hook up in ten minutes. So, you come over the bridge, drive to the lot while your southbound trailer is being prepped, drop off your load, do the paperwork, pick up the new one, and off you go. Yes, it will never be that smooth, but it’s not “impossible”.

  6. Not hard to do, we used to call it “pin to pin”. I haul the trailer so far to meet my switch at the designated spot, drop it for him/her to hook up to and carry on. I hook up to the trailer they just brought and head back to where I came from. The trailers/freight get to where they need to, even across the country, and I am home every night. No added cost, two trailers get to where they have to, using two tractors and two drivers.

    1. *
      “Not hard to do, we used to call it “pin to pin”.

      we called it “the (insert location here) switch.”

      the only additional complication is a little thing
      called “the border.”

      *

      1. Still doable, a little planning goes a long ways, everyone is to lazy to think about solutions, or too cheap, heaven forbid the companies involved have to buy a few trucks and hire a few drivers.

        1. Most of our drivers are from the Indian subcontinent, today. Flights every day in and out….. to India and back. India is remarkably WUFLU free/sarc
          One of them ran a stop sign in remote (I mean remote) Saskatchewan a year or two ago. Wiped out a bus full of hockey players. What was the name of that place, oh yeah Humboldt, Sask.

        2. 8,000-10,000 trucks daily on the Ambassador Bridge. Where are you going to find that many truck drivers?

        3. Davis has obviously never been a dispatcher or driver supervisor. Switches work great until a driver gets sick or a truck breaks down. Dozens of times a desperate dispatcher asked me, “ Do you have enough hours to do the sickamoose switch?” More often than not the answer would be, “ I can get there but I have to have eight hours off before Golden and more often than not she would say, “ I guess we’ll have to do that then.” And presto your trailer is a day late. Always a big hit with the customers.
          You haven’t tried to hire a truck driver lately have you? The good ones are all working as fast as they can go. All that is on offer are arrogant ignoramases who would wreck a manual transmission in a month! Are you going to buy a new truck and put one of them in it?

  7. The most obvious flaw is the lack of any place to do all this trailer swapping at the borders since the whole point would be to keep drivers from coming into Canada from the US. The sheer volume of truck traffic makes this impractical at ports like Windsor or Port Huron.
    Then there’s the number of drivers American companies would have to commit to driving freight to the border. Roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of that freight is currently being pulled into Canada from the US by Canadian drivers. There would certainly be an under capacity on the part of US based trucking companies if they had to make up for the shortfall of Canadian drivers under an enforced border switch arrangement.
    After that there would be the headache of finding backhauls from the Canadian line back into the US since there is usually an imbalance in incoming and outgoing freight. American companies may decide the hassle just isn’t worth it and spurn loads to the border and at that point the Canadian supply chain would be in deep trouble.

    1. All too true but you forgot all the help you are going to get from the strutting peacocks justifying their desks at the boarder.

  8. Is this not the same wisdom that proclaims the day of the commercial driver is over,they shall be replaced by AI and the “self driving tractor…
    Except those promoting the “future” apparently can’t drive,in reality they speak as if they do not even have a class 5 license..
    But somehow they know,their fabulous toy can do it all.

    Funny how government and its sycophants insist we accept,on faith,that the Dread Covid Virus can be stopped by government action..
    Yet these are the same people unable to keep out invasive plants,never mind stop smugglers.

  9. Study says, study says, study says……………..

    My BS detector always goes off when the mediots state “study says”

    More like “Propaganda says”……………….

  10. “But if data indicates that truck drivers are a significant source of virus importation…”

    Every encounter an American trucker had with a Canadian citizen would likely be at some form of business where masks are mandatory. So, what the ‘experts’ are actually telling us is that masks don’t do shit.

    1. Has anyone even bothered to track how many cases of the Wu-flu have been traced to truckers?

  11. While I’m sure hand-overs like this are done, they are not done en-mass at a single location. If I were part of an organized crime network, though, this would be great! I bet a properly planned operation could leave a busy border station with a full trailer an hour! Not to mention the smuggling opportunities. I say do it, it would probably wind up getting more products to consumers faster.

  12. We have been listening to supposed experts for 14 months, ” wear a mask, stay at least 6 ft apart, don t have your family over for Christmas Dinner or Easter either too Dangerous, sanitize your hands upon entering a store. We are closing restraunts and bars to keep you safe because you can t be trusted, we are closing schools because we are better qualified than you at protecting your children”. In the meantime two flights a day arrive from China and India, regular flights also are arriving from UK Brazil and South Africa among other places. If you are a Canadian citizen you are forced to observe a 14 day isolation at one of the Trudeau Hiltons at your own expense. So experts so far you don t have any idea of what to do so how about you quit kidding yourselves and lying to us.

  13. I think Canada should seriously implement her system, beginning at the border crossing just south of Vancouver. And when our “expert” experiences food shortages – well, then, it’s for the good of the cause.

    1. The problem is none of these “experts” are ever affected by the damage their insane policies inflict. They float through life, utterly useless parasites, and utterly convinced of their gleaming virtue.

  14. You’re forgetting about the prostitutes.
    For truck drivers there must be prostitutes available at the switch zone.
    Schedule your prostitute and customs inspections here:
    Canada Border Services/Customs: 1-800-461-9999
    This should be no different from visiting Niagara Viagra Falls Canada.
    All prostitutes will have required papers certifying Canadian origin.
    这名中国妓女被加盖加拿大邮票
    Zhè míng zhōngguó jìnǚ bèi jiā gài jiānádà yóupiào
    Product of Canada

    I couldn’t wait on Allan S. any longer.

  15. Hard to believe anything after the opening 3 paragraphs of propaganda. I’m done trusting ‘the experts’.

  16. In one of my incarnations I ran a national company with national sales and distribution and the kid is full of something and it isn’t knowledge. I imported from the the US and Asia. What a load of crap people are being fed theses days. The whu who flu is not killing us all and it will not kill us all, the stupid just might have a shot at it.

  17. Well this explains why when you go to a hospital emergency there are wait times in hours.

  18. I’m so old that I remember when (pre NAFTA) all trucks from Mexico had to drop their loads at a border marshaling yard for a U.S. driver to move it into the USA. Don’t recall if that ever applied to Canada at the time as I was living down south, but it was possible. Then again our current truck traffic cross-border is probably 20X what it was back in the 1970’s

    Adds cost and slows logistics, other than that, sure go for it and make Canada more non-competitive.

    1. At one time that was the norm. Today, it won’t work. Take Coutts AB / Sweetgrass MT for example.
      Prior to 1985, almost all less than truckload freight was offloaded into a sufferance warehouse at the border to await clearance. Four companies – 2 corporations with US and Canadian divisions – would regularly transfer north bound from the Us division to the Canadian division.

      All shipments via Consolidated Freightways would be transferred to Canadian Freightways going North. Vice-versa going south.

      For deliveries within Alberta, Hill & Hill transferred the freight to its Canadian division. Deliveries to Alaska remained with the US division.

      Eventually offloading became too costly. Only if Customs ordered it, or the transport company found out it did not have running rights for Alberta, would anything be offloaded.

      Hill & Hill still went bankrupt and CF built its own transfer yard. CF went bankrupt in ‘05 and Transforce bought the Canadian division. The sufferance warehouse, CF transfer yard and office are gone.

      Since the new US/Canada border port was built there is no room or place for transferring to happen. Everything is set up for electronic customs clearance. Trucks only park for exceptions or for examination.

  19. When the Winnipeg Blue Bombers played their very first game in their new stadium they had people stationed on the roads leading to the stadium to hand out paper brochures with parking instructions, locations, transit schedules, etc, to every single automobile. Each incoming vehicle just had to stop, open their window, grab the brochure, and continue driving to the stadium.

    That one single act caused such a back up that the stadium was not filled until the third quarter of the football game.

    Now imagine every truck coming out of customs has to stop, unhook, and pass off to another driver, then move over, pick up another trailer, then drive back into customs going the other way. Multiply that by 10,000 trucks each and every single day (assuming you could find and schedule a few thousand extra truck drivers.) You would have chaos. Every Canadian factory would be idled within days. Food would disappear from shelves.

  20. Sad to see such hogwash in the National Post. I had such high hopes for them when they first started up.

  21. Paper logic, no experience required. “Good judgement is based on experience. Experience is based on poor judgement.”

  22. Having looked at the ICU admissions graphs from a previous post which show they are dropping all over Europe (and the USA), where I’m sure truckers criss-cross borders multiple times a day…it would seem “truckers” aren’t the problem here.

  23. As a species that has nuclear energy and went to the moon and back, there sure are a lot of “can’t do” comments.
    Don’t sail too far out boys, you’ll fall off the edge of the earth……………….

    1. Or maybe we’re not interested in insane expensive “solutions” to a problem which doesn’t exist.

      Viz “climate crisis”.

  24. I ran a logisitics office, and drove truck for years. Most American truckers dont cross into Canada its only the Canadians. This is already basically done on the Mexican border, and wouldnt take much to have in place in Canada. It would actually lose Canadian drivers money, because it would mean the Americans are getting the higher paying freight going to the Canadian Border. Anyone who thinks this is undoable isnt a driver or hasnt worked in trucking. Not hard to do.

    None of this means that I think its a good idea or worth it… just that there arent any real hurdles here.

    1. Detroit/Windsor has about 6 trucks pass through it every minute. Assume it could be perfectly orchestrated, with a change over taking 10 minutes. That would take a lot that can handle 60 trucks, with the necessary entrance and exit ramps, security, authentication, etc. Then add inevitable delays due to weather, logistical errors, crime, etc. So, lets say triple that lot size. That’s a pretty big investment for what amounts to a severe flu, unless, of course, this flu is eternal. If that particular investment is made, its a sure sign that we are totally screwed.

  25. Has anyone given any consideration to the OWNERS of the trailers? Once a trailer is disconnected from a USA tractor/driver and driven into Canada, what guarantee is there that it will ever come back? It could end up sitting in a corner of a warehouse lot gathering dust, losing the owner both haulage income and the original investment.

    And couldn’t customs say that a trailer coming in “unaccompanied” and with no guarantee of leaving the country must be treated as an asset being imported, and therefore be subject to duty/tariff?

    There’s more to it than just swapping the tractors out!

    1. Joey W, Just an addendum, I once shipped a ten ton blower to Alabama for a rebuild, and when it was shipped back it vanished for three weeks, and the trailer and blower were found parked in Canada in a cut out, vandalized and in need of more blower and trailer repair. Original cost of the blower rebuild was $75 grand, and shipping about $7 grand. The extra expenses were another $10 grand. That doesn’t even consider the loss of the trailer use for that time period. As the military well know, every plan is perfect until you engage the enemy. It’s really easy to solve issues on paper, but if you added the financial and legal responsibility of the results to the initiating “experts”, I would bet there would be far less experts initiating.

      1. I don’t think this is easy, even on paper. Don’t forget, it would be federally mandated, so you’d have a newly minted “federal office of covid-compliant freight management”, a subsidiary dept. of the CBSA, running it, and the provinces would want their cut of the action…jurisdictional disputes, not to mention cooperation on the American federal and state level, arguments about who is gonna pay and who is gonna collect, which union workers are gonna do what, etc, and I’m sure some of the larger freight companies would get involved, use it as a lever to help squeeze out a bit of the competition, maybe even the much-vaunted CSA could get in on it…

  26. Why not just cut the Gordian Knot and join the USA? Solve a lot of problems and lower costs, too. Hmmmm? Any takers?
    Oh, yeah “health care”.

  27. well.. if vaccines are the answer then just vaccinate all truckers as they cross borders.

  28. Russia has a wider rail gauge than western Europe. When the Germans invaded in 1941 they did not have enough troops engaged in changing the rail gauge so they would unload trains at the Polish Russian border and reload them onto captured Russian trains. The German logistic system collapsed as a result of this poor planning.

Navigation