Moving to a new country is stressful—from dealing with paperwork and looking for an apartment, to adjusting to new cultural norms and being away from family. “The challenges when you arrive here [are because] it’s all new to you,” says Ryan Robertson, a truck driver based in Castlegar, B.C. “If you had a guide to help you get settled, [who] knows where to go and how to do the things you need to get the proper paperwork—once you have someone to show you all of that, then it would be much easier for you to settle in,” he says. “For the driving part, if you just have a GPS you’ll know where to go,” he adds with a laugh. When it comes to immigrating to a new country, it helps to have a relative or a friend for a ‘GPS’. If you’re lucky, that GPS could even be your new employer. Robertson, 43, had been working for a local trucking company in Jamaica when B.C.-based Sutco Transportation Specialists visited the country to recruit drivers. With 17 years of professional driving experience under his belt, Robertson thought it would be interesting to come to Canada and see what the opportunity would bring. So he applied, got the job, and moved to Kelowna after receiving his work permit, issued through a positive Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA)—then known as the Labour Market Opinion (LMO). This was in 2013. While the first three months were challenging, Roberson says Sutco was helpful with what he needed. Mario Šipek, 40, shared a similar experience. In 2015, he interviewed with two transportation companies that were visiting Zagreb to recruit truck drivers, one of which was Sutco. “I talked with my wife and said, ‘Should I go? What do we have to lose? Let’s go and see what happens,’” Šipek says. He made the cut with both employers, and eventually went with Sutco, where he now works as a wood chip driver—just as he did in Croatia. “I never regretted it. It was a good decision.” Šipek goes on to explain how the company assisted with his accommodation and paperwork and provided recommendations for other things he needed—which Robertson echoes. “Just about anything I asked for, they helped out with,” says Roberson. “They were like a family.” The family-like experience was intentional. Sutco itself is a family-run transportation company founded by husband-and-wife Chris and Melanie Sutherland in 1995, together with Chris’ father, Robert. Headquartered in Salmo, B.C., Sutco hired their first international driver in 2012. “The reason I’m super passionate about this is that I’ve personally been through it,” says Doug Sutherland, president of Sutco and brother to Chris. Doug shared his experiences living in Mexico, not knowing the language and looking for a place to live. “You need help from so many people to be successful,” he says. He then lived in the US for about seven years, where he had to go through the immigration process. “And my wife is Mexican. So we went through all the paperwork for the US when she was there, and all the same processes when she came to Canada.” Seeing some of these challenges first-hand, Sutherland says, played a lot into their own process when it came to hiring workers from abroad. “How can we help people when they come? How can we make that easier?” The trucking industry is not exempt from migrant worker exploitation, whether it’s charging recruits big sums of money for a job or sending them on the road without adequate training. The latter has led to deadly consequences, including the Humboldt Broncos bus crash that killed 16 in 2018. “One of the challenges we have is that underbelly of the industry—those that are bringing in workers and not treating them fairly. That’s a challenge for us because it impacts the image of our industry,” says Angela Splinter, CEO of Trucking HR Canada. She adds that while they don’t want migrant drivers to end up in abusive fleets, LMIAs for their recruitment can still get approved and issued. Canada’s shortage of truck drivers doesn’t help. According to Trucking HR, there are about 20,000 vacant truck driver positions in the country, with 61 per cent of employers reporting they are unable to find the drivers they need. And while the unemployment rate among truck drivers is lower at 6.2 per cent compared to the rest of the workforce at 9.8 per cent, “if every currently unemployed truck driver were hired into a vacant position, there would still be more than 11,000 unfilled jobs,” Trucking HR reports. “The demand for drivers is going to continue and the demand to bring them in from overseas is going to continue,” says Dave Earle, president and CEO of the British Columbia Trucking Association. “So what we’ve seen is a wide variety of approaches [among trucking companies],” he says.