Thank you for having me here.
I'm Andy Livingston. My wife and I run the feed and water station in Thunder Bay called The Barn. We look after all the livestock going east and west. We're right in the centre of the country. We move about 240,000 to 250,000 animals through our place every year. It's a unique type of business. In layman's terms, it's a bed and breakfast for livestock.
The animals are brought in on semis, unloaded and put in pens where they have adequate feed and water and a place to lie down and rest. At the same time, the truckers house in their trucks, but we have a facility here that is similar to a truck stop. We have a kitchen, a washroom, showers, laundry and a common place for everybody to relax.
The average time here is about eight to nine hours, but since the ELDs have come in, we're seeing more and more drivers having to sit out a 36-hour rest period. When that happens, things get very complicated around here, because that pen is taken up for three to four shifts and nobody wants to pay the extra bills.
In my estimation, ELD and livestock should not go in the same sentence. These are live animals, and it's a long way from Clyde, Alberta, to Quebec City. When they have to get within an hour of here and stop for eight hours so that they can drive an hour to get here in order to stop for another eight hours, they're wasting a whole lot of time, and the driver's not making any money. He's out in no man's land. Everybody forgets about him.
It's not good for the animals to be sitting on the side of the road, only moving for an hour and then getting off the truck. If they're moving, get them to stop and get them off the truck so they can relax and take their time.
What we're seeing here is a lot more of an increase in mortality and injured animals by the time they get here. That's caused by the time frame they're under. They have to drive at a fairly steady pace and they can't afford to stop for 15 minutes to check their cattle because now, if they do that, they're not going to make their destination.
You should stop with a load of cattle. You should stop every three or four hours and take a quick peek at what's going on in the trailer behind you. Get any downers up, and rearrange where everybody's standing on the trailer if you have to. Those things all take time, and those 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there just take away from your total driving time.
In northern Ontario, you have 2,000 kilometres of two-lane highway. It's probably the worst highway in the world. It's just a disaster, with the freight haulers and the livestock haulers all trying to share the same road. With the ELDs, everybody is at 105 kilometres an hour because we have to make time—we have to make time. Time is the only thing that anybody considers. Throw a bit of a fender-bender in there or some weather, for example, and the road is closed. It's nothing for it to be closed for 18 hours at a time.
Our place here gets backed up with road closures. We have the capability to handle 22 straight loads of cattle, and we've had 38 loads in here at any given time because of road closures. Why are there road closures? It's because the ELDs are forcing people to drive erratically.
I drove a truck for a while and I know what it's all about, so I'm not a big fan of a machine telling me when to sleep and when to go to work. You do your own thing at your own pace and you make it work.
When COVID was here, we were one of the few organizations where these livestock trucks had a place to get something to eat and have a shower, whether they were empty going west or loaded going east. We did whatever we had to do to ensure all the drivers were taken care of and the livestock was looked after at the same time.
On the two-lane highway from West Hawk to North Bay, there are very few safe places, or even any places, just to pull in to rest. With all the local restaurants going out of business, they block off all the entrances, so there is no more truck parking. You're seeing more trucks parking on the side of the road or in what we call up here the snowplow turnarounds. You can put two or three trucks in. You maybe only have enough room for that and one guy's ass-end is still sticking out on the highway and somebody else comes along and hits him.