Trucking

Truck drivers are more important than basketball players, Rick Nicholls told Doug Ford in a letter sent January 11^th.

“Please pick up the phone and call Justin Trudeau. Please tell him that truck drivers are more important than basketball and hockey players. Please ask him not to eliminate the essential workers exemption for truck drivers,” Nicholls wrote. He was referring to the January 15^th deadline for elimination of the essential workers’ exemption for truckers crossing the US border.

“Doug Ford needs to pick up the phone and call his friend Chrystia Freeland. He needs to tell the Trudeau government to back down on eliminating the COVID exemption for truckers crossing the border,” says Rick Nicholls, MPP for Chatham-Kent-Leamington.

“The Trudeau government is manufacturing another crisis that could mean food shortages for all Canadians…I look forward to seeing stories about Justin Trudeau and his family not getting the food they need. Do you think we will see that happen? I doubt it,” Nicholls says.

The same automated search of the document finds that the word “snow” is used twice, in relation to the driver’s r

We’ve got big concerns that this government has no plan to avoid a much worse disruption of supply chains, and hasn’t taken the steps to ensure that things like food and critical building supplies get where they need to go so Canadians can get what they need, during a crisis, which I should add, has been two years in two years.

As Canada starts the 10-day countdown to January 15^th, when previously exempt truck drivers will require proof of full vaccination to cross the border, lobbying and other communications activities are intensifying.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has updated its website to include the point that truck drivers may need to “complete arrival test and quarantine if selected,” a concept that has taken some drivers by complete surprise: “No one has mentioned anything to me about the possibility of quarantine – none of the border guards I speak regularly, and not my employer,” one Alberta trucker told Road Warrior News. “I cannot park my truck and quarantine for two weeks. No way.”

Road Warrior News (RWN) has received a copy of the flyer handed to a truck driver on January 4^th, 2021. The image of the flyer is posted above, and the full text of the flyer is posted below.

Other truckers who crossed the border January 4^th have indicated they were not provided with any verbal or paper warnings of the January 15^th changes to Canada’s requirements.

RWN has submitted several questions to Transport Canada’s media department in an attempt to clarify some of the language which is not clear, including the definitions of “limited exceptions” and “fully vaccinated” and the “exemptions in the national interest” which are noted on Canada’s website.  Updates will follow when information is received.

Some truck drivers report they are already being asked to show proof of vaccination at the US border (“apparently, it is already linked to my Canadian passport” one driver notes) while others are being waved through. Since the launch of COVID restrictions almost two years ago, truck drivers have been exempt from showing proof of vaccination and many report they have never even been asked about it by Border Agents.