Mission: To lead the BC Trucking Association as the industry grapples with a looming skills shortage exacerbated by increasingly complex border policies
Assets: 15 years of experience at the BCTA tackling policy issues and helping to increase the organization’s profile and clout
Yield: Spearheaded development of B.C.’s first professional truck-driver training program and led the BCTA’s fuel-efficiency file
By Jenny Wagler
Two years into an undergraduate degree in journalism at Carlton University in the 1980s, Louise Yako came to a conclusion: she was too shy for journalism.
“Having to, on a daily basis, meet new people, learn about new things – I just found that very intimidating,” she recalled, noting that she completed the program only because she couldn’t transfer her credits elsewhere.
Today, the irony of that early self-doubt isn’t lost on the BC Trucking Association’s (BCTA) new president and CEO.
“I have a wide range of stakeholders; I spend all of my time talking to people, many of whom I’ve never met before.” Yako said. “All those things that I thought I couldn’t do, I’m doing now.”
Stepping into BCTA’s top role this month, Yako brings with her 15 years of experience at the organization, most recently as vice-president of policy, communications and partnerships. And to hear longtime BCTA colleague Michele Nicol tell it, Yako is “an excellent leader” and more than equipped for the job ahead.
“She has very high expectations for herself and others, but she’s also very supportive,” said Nicol, BCTA’s director of business operations. “She’s got a lot of strategic big-picture thinking, but she also doesn’t lose sight of the details.”
Yako found her way into a career in public policy and advocacy through an MBA from the University of British Columbia, after trying – and quickly rejecting – editorial roles in Japan and at North Vancouver’s Specialty Technical Publishers.
She said that for her purposes the MBA path wasn’t part of a plan for a business career, but rather a more general “door-opener.”
“I focused on courses that I thought would provide a good background for understanding the development of sound public policy,” she said, noting that her interest in government dated back to her undergraduate days in Ottawa. “My goal at the end [of the MBA] – I didn’t have one starting – was to work for an organization outside of government that would nonetheless impact it.”
Yako landed a job as manager of government and inter-agency affairs for the BCTA in 1996, a few months after finishing her MBA. She estimated her in-coming knowledge of B.C.’s trucking industry as “a big fat zero.”
“I think [the BCTA] decided they would take a big flyer on me even though I didn’t know anything and even though I was relatively young – because they thought I could learn.”
Yako said her initial BCTA role primarily involved supporting member committees dealing with policy issues ranging from taxation to employment standards to cross-border issues.
“A lot of what I did was identifying problems, identifying solutions and figuring out how we were going to go to government and frame that problem and solution,” she said, noting that presenting a workable solution is a core part of the BCTA’s approach.
Yako said that in her 15 years at the BCTA, the organization’s administration has expanded to 14 from four and nearly doubled its direct carrier members to 450 from 230.
Her own role, she said, has evolved and expanded in parallel to the organization’s growth, for which she credits outgoing president and CEO Paul Landry.
“It’s gotten to a point now where we are contacted regularly by various levels of government saying, ‘Can you participate in this; can you provide feedback?’ – to the point where we’re now having to look at everything very closely and say, ‘We don’t have time for that,’” she said. “So my role has changed from saying, ‘Hey, we’re out here’ to almost having to be a gatekeeper and being very selective in terms of the issues that we’re dealing with.”
In Yako’s tenure at the BCTA, she’s participated in key efforts to improve the state of B.C.’s trucking sector, including advocacy work that helped bring about the economic deregulation of the industry in B.C. in 1997.
“We were the last jurisdiction in North America [to deregulate],” she said. “It started in early ’80s in the U.S., and there we were, the last of the dinosaurs.”
More recently, Yako has headed up the organization’s fuel-efficiency file, working with the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure to establish ways for the trucking industry to help the province achieve its goal of reducing emissions by 33% by 2020. She has also spearheaded the development of a professional truck-driver training program that she hopes to see implemented as early as next year.
Thanks to the BCTA’s achievements to date, Yako said many of the industry’s top problems have already been addressed.
“A lot of the big-ticket issues are gone,” she said. “So a lot of our problems for members are things like pavement markings being removed from highways more quickly than they were before.”
But, she said, the industry is continuing to face pressures from a market that is focused only on the bottom line.
“A lot of companies who require trucking services are now almost exclusively looking at price and not at quality of service, not at long-term relationships,” she said. “When you’ve got that kind of cutthroat competitiveness, it makes it very difficult for companies to know when to invest, how to invest, to pay their people well and to make sure that those people are trained.”
Yako said the key challenge ahead for the industry is a looming skills shortage.
“I can’t tell you how many 60- and 70-year-old truck drivers are still out there,” she said, explaining that the industry is failing to draw in sufficient new entrants. That, she said, is being exacerbated by an increasingly thick border, which she calls “a thorn in our side.”
“It’s difficult enough to find long-distance truck drivers,” she said. “If you add in problems at the border, wait times at the border, what they consider to be harassment at the border, regulations they have to comply with when it’s not really clear why you need to comply with them – all of that is going to really make people think twice about ‘Do I want to be going into the United States?’ and ‘Do I want to be a truck having to deal with that?’”
But while Yako doesn’t undercut the challenges ahead, she said the BCTA will be going at them from two sides: raising government’s awareness of the impacts new policies will have on an industry facing a skills shortage and developing trucking-friendly solutions that meet government’s needs.
“If we have problem, we also have a responsibility to come up with a solution.”