B.C.’s first Container Trucking Commissioner didn’t last long.
Andy Smith, who was appointed February 3 by the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, resigned late yesterday afternoon.
Smith is the president and CEO of the B.C. Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA), which represents ship owners and terminal operators.
Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Todd Stone said in a statement Tuesday that creation of the commissioner’s position was aimed at ensuring “long-term stability in the container trucking sector that serves Port Metro Vancouver, to uphold the newly enacted legislation and to support better working conditions for container truckers serving the port after a bitter labour dispute.”
That dispute stalled goods movement through the port for close to a month in March 2014.
But Smith’s appointment was controversial from the start.
At the time, Gavin McGarrigle, B.C. director for Unifor, which represents around 400 of the container truckers who work at the port, questioned whether Smith was the right choice for the job given that he headed the organization that represents terminal operators.
McGarrigle said Smith’s appointment appeared to be “a blatant conflict of interest.”
Following Smith’s resignation, the union boss said Unifor was “happy to see he has resigned. We never thought he was the right person for the job. We thought it was a case of the fox guarding the hen house. What’s sad about it though is that we have wasted seven months going through this fiasco, and meanwhile drivers are owed thousands of dollars and these [trucking] companies continue to thumb their noses at the law.”
McGarrigle added that his organization has seen no progress in enforcing penalties and sanctions contained in the new regulations against what he called “outrageous rogue companies that just turn their nose up at anything, including the law.”
During an August 28 interview with Business in Vancouver regarding the rising tide of challenges facing West Coast ports and container terminals (https://www.biv.com/article/2015/9/container-shipping-complications-horizon-west-coas/), Peter Xotta, Port Metro Vancouver’s (PMV) vice-president of planning and operations, said there were understandably bumps along the road in the transition to the new reservation system for shipping container pickup and drop-off at the port’s container terminals.
But he said the port was confident that “we are doing the right things.”
Port Metro Vancouver’s truck licence system, which was revamped in the wake of the 2014 container trucker strike, also significantly reduced the number of licences issued to container trucking companies allowing them access to port terminals.
Xotta pointed out that PMV’s container terminal reservation system was now being emulated in other West Coast North American ports like L.A.-Long Beach. Ten of the 13 container terminals in what is North America’s busiest container port adopted a trucker appointment system action plan in late August that is aimed at establishing a trucker reservation system beginning next year.
Xotta added that one of the new system’s main goals, reducing trucker turn times at container terminals, has been successful in cutting the amount of time drivers have to wait for container loading and unloading at terminals to an average of around 38 minutes. He said a year ago that average wait time was between three and four hours.
But Western Canadian Shippers’ Coalition chairman David Montpetit told BIV that the cost of the new system for his organization’s membership has doubled in the past three years and made it prohibitively expense to use container for shipping wood products back to Asia via containers.
WCSC representatives met with Smith on September 15.
Montpetit said Smith’s departure “is highly disappointing and a tremendous loss for both the container trucking sector and the shippers who rely on the stability of service at the Port of Metro
Vancouver.”
He said his organization commended Smith “for the significant progress he has made during his tenure as commissioner, particularly in the area of developing relationships in the community and with other key stakeholders.”
Stone said a search for Smith’s replacement would begin immediately.
Smith had not returned a BIV call for comment at the time of this story’s posting.
