In the face of trade disruptions, while governments grapple with inter-provincial trade, our biggest struggle in British Columbia is intra-provincial trade. While it’s important to remove barriers in shipping wine from BC to Ontario, what about removing delays and costs in shipping wine from Kelowna to Vancouver? To expedite trade and grow the regional economy, the BC Trucking Association is calling upon local governments in Metro Vancouver to immediately harmonize bylaws and permitting processes.  

A rudimentary first step to do this is to agree on basic definitions, like what constitutes a “truck”. It is astounding that after seven years, not all Metro Vancouver municipalities have fully adopted a common regional definition of a truck to align municipal bylaws with provincial regulations.   

A standardized definition will allow governments to synchronize local and provincial regulations and drastically reduce timelines and costs for permitting. For instance, a large, over-dimensional truck carrying oversized loads from Kelowna to the Vancouver Fraser Port must navigate a maze of permits. This includes a provincial permit to travel on highways, a TransLink permit to cross a bridge, and various local permits for municipal road access. Each of these permits has its conditions, timelines, and fees. In other provinces, securing all necessary permits takes hours or a single day; in BC, it often drags on for weeks or even months.  

Trucking plays a crucial role in distributing over $1 billion worth of goods in Metro Vancouver every day. However, it’s astonishing that millions of dollars’ worth of goods are regularly rerouted to US ports solely due to the cumbersome administrative processes required to cross Metro Vancouver. As a result, we lose millions of dollars’ worth of trade due to the delays caused by onerous permitting processes. 

Metro Vancouver is in a unique position to boost trade throughout the province by simply aligning their bylaws, policies, and procedures. By implementing the Regional Permit Policies and Procedures Manual (RP3M) spearheaded by TransLink, we can establish a Single Regional Term Permit for transporting goods and materials within the Metro Vancouver area.  

With the launch of the provincial OnRouteBC system for provincial permits and the adoption of the RP3M, the government is in a prime position to set up a “One-Stop-Shop” for permitting across the province. This initiative will significantly cut down on timelines, costs, and administrative hurdles involved in the movement of goods. The faster we move goods, the faster we can deliver, build and grow across the province.   

However, before we can achieve all this, we need to start by agreeing on what a truck is.