ORC:
I’m sorry my ‘attitude’ upsets or offends you, this was not my intention.
I am at the stage in life where I have money, so I’m looking for opportunity and a bit of adventure. I’m not looking to be living as a bread line slave, but I’m not expecting the roads to be paved with gold either. A fair wage for a fair day’s work is all I ask, I can cover the rest. I have friends in Canada, I don’t know any Bulgarians, so I’m looking west if that’s okay.
I hear so many people moaning about truck driving, how terrible it is, how hard it is, what a “God awful job” it is. However, I actually enjoy it - is that so hard to believe?
As the title says, advice sought…but not judgmental criticism please. It is rather ironic that some of you guys are ‘convenient foreigners’ too.
Your attitude doesn’t upset me but it seems incredibly naive to how things really are here. I too enjoy truck driving in general, I always have and thats why I became one, I grew up with it and always wanted to be a driver. However, after 19 months of hell at one of the bottom dweller companies in Canada that I first started with, the same sort of firm you seem hell bent on working for, for as little money as they wish, with as much unpaid waiting time as they wish and paying them for the privilledge of having you, it shows how little you understand about the job here. Canada is not Britain with bonneted trucks and open roads, its a different world and just like absolutely everybody else who works for those sorts of companies, you too will soon tire of waiting all day to get loaded, then driving all night fighting tiredness to rush to the delivery, to then wait all day getting tipped, and then drive all night etc. Why the hell would you want to work 7 days a week for what you should earn in 3 or 4 days of properly organised work? You don’t have to work for these idiots to get in to Canada, thats just the quick route in (or it was) because they’re the cowboys who are constantly after new drivers to replaced those who’ve burnt out.
Very few of us on here who are still in Canada were convenient foreigners, most of us stood up against this sort of treatment and in doing so ruffled many feathers. We refused to sit around for free and be treat like a red neck lemming and in many cases we became the highest paid drivers at companies because we demanded to be run right and all the crap then went to those who put up and shut up, usually the Canadians who’ve never known things any other way. Now in places like New Brunswick, European drivers make up a huge percentage of drivers and companies have had to become more efficient at keeping us running and earning in order to keep us in their employment, and since the tightening up of the LMO/LMIA rules this has paid off and pay and conditions are improving quite dramatically at a lot of firms. If you were able to come here, you could benefit from this and do better for yourself, or you could accept rock bottom and do yourself no favours and come to Canada, offer to work for 32cpm, tell them you’re willing to be awake day and night and sit around for hours or days waiting for reloads and expect no pay for it, because you’re happy to bum around earning very little.
My Bulgaria scenario was semi-serious, you would probably enjoy it more in the long run. Canada and the US are vast areas of uniformity in many ways, you can drive for days and very little changes, all the buildings look the same, so all the towns and cities do, its all just identical urban sprawl with idiot car drivers that are far beyond anything in the UK. At least if you were living in the cab for a Bulgarian company you’d see much more interesting things, places and people. Western Canada and the US are quite nice for a while, but everything east of the rockies in both countries soon gets very old, especially when you run up and down the same thousands of miles of interstate week in, week out.
At the end of the day you’re in charge of your own destiny, I can only say what I think from my own experience here. I think your wrong in what your expectations of Canada will be like and what you’re willing to put up with from employers to be here but its your choice to make.
