Content area
Full Text
The following interview was granted exclusively to Business Information Group publications. Lou Smyrlis, editor of Motortruck and Canadian Transportation & Logistics, conducted the interview in Toronto on Oct. 24.
TN: In the six months you've held the Ministry of Transportation portfolio, what has proved to be the most challenging issue as far as commercial transportation is concerned?
Sterling: The issue I have heard about the most is the employment situation for firms trying to hire skilled professional drivers.
TN: What can your government do to help improve the situation?
Sterling: We are looking at things. I sit on the education committee and have raised the issue when we were talking about apprenticeships.
Also with licensing we are going to create several different kinds of licensing that hopefully will bring forward a high degree of professionalism to truck drivers so that qualifications will be varied and there will some truck drivers that will aspire to a different level.
By offering that differentiation, you also allow some of the profession to reach higher and that in the end will prove good to the industry. I would like to encourage the industry to have an apprenticeship program.
In speaking with trucking companies, I believe that one of the reasons they like to hire people from, for example, Britain, is that there is a level of professionalism that hasn't been achieved in our province and I don't see why we shouldn't be able to do it.
TN: What is your ministry's position on toll highways? Are there any conditions under which you would support tolling existing highways?
Sterling: It's very, very difficult to toll existing highways and sell it politically. There is no contemplation of doing that in any way, shape or form.
It would be resisted not only by the trucking community but by the general population.
The whole key to tolled highways is can you advance a project significantly in timing by gaining capital through that mechanism? For instance, the 407, particularly the east and west links of it, probably would not have been built for 20 years.
The mid-peninsula corridor, somebody will decide, probably five to eight years from now, as to how they are going to fund that project.
We will establish where it...