An extended excerpt from Gord Magill’s End of the Road.
Like many high schools, mine had a wonderful cast of characters, including the teachers, who ran the gamut of school-teacher stereotypes. One such instructor was Madame Waite, who taught French. Like most Anglophones, who are referred to by certain Québécois as têtes carrées, or blockheads, I only took the minimum required single French credit to obtain my Ontario Secondary School Diploma. I can’t even remember who the teacher was, but it wasn’t Madame Waite; although I never took one of her classes, I will never forget her.
With tightly curled silver-gray hair, glasses, and a somewhat diminutive figure cloaked in the unassuming and boring wardrobe one associates with a librarian, Madame Waite didn’t cut the profile that you might think would occupy the mind of a horny teenage boy. She occupied mine for a different reason, however, and only after I dared to make fun of her with a newly learned Québécois slur.
One of the cultural exchanges I was privileged to experience before many of my peers was regular interaction with les camionneurs, or, as my Anglo trucker friends referred to them, Frenchmen. As part of my duties after school, I regularly went into the two big steel mills of Hamilton, Stelco and Dofasco, to assist the evening-shift drivers with chaining down and tarping loads of steel coils. While the loads we picked up were typically bound for points in the United States, les camionneurs, being truckers from Québec, were taking their loads back home, or possibly points further east.
A fixture of truck driving is the amount of time one spends standing around at various facilities, yakking with other truckers who, like you, are also waiting to be loaded or unloaded. Stelco and Dofasco were no exception, and it was in these convivial hangouts that I was first exposed to Québécois culture, not having yet set foot in La Belle Province. By this time I had taken a fair bit of French instruction: all eight years of elementary school and mandatory grade-nine French in high school. But it was not enough to enable me to competently hold court with my garrulous new trucker associates at the mill. They repeatedly used a word I had not been taught in school: tabarnak. They used it with the same frequency with which a certain type of young working-class guy drops the F-bomb. Tabarnak was one of those words that could be a noun, verb, adjective, or expression of surprise or dismay, sometimes all at once. Like the many sacres, it was versatile and profane, a Catholic liturgical term that had been weaponized as a vulgar expression in Québécois society.
One day I thought I would impress my friends and get a rise out of Madame Waite by yelling tabarnak! at the top of my lungs when I saw her coming down the hallway. Needless to say, she was not impressed, and with a mixture of mortification and the death stare one can only get from a true schoolmarm, Madame Waite exclaimed, “You can’t say that! Where did you learn to say that? Certainly not in any classroom here!” My friends, ignorant of les sacres, laughed at me for being the object of Madame Waite’s fury, and they moved on as I was interrogated by her. I told her the truth: “I learned it from truckers at Stelco!” Madame Waite rolled her eyes. A teacher who had overheard the exchange reminded me that this was not Stelco, and that I had better carry on to my next class and not repeat this new word.
“Cette prof a une branche au queue tabarnak!”
Later in life I came to regret not taking an additional three years of French while in high school (for free, no less). My trucking adventures took me to Montreal and eventually all over La Belle Province (or through it en route to the Maritimes). It would have been helpful to have the ability to communicate with the many folks I met in rural and especially Northern Québec who did not speak English, though my rudimentary understanding of the language allowed me to read road signs, order a coffee at Maison Tim Horton, or tell staff when arriving at a lumber mill, “Je suis un camionneur ici pour récupérer une chargez de bois à destination du Michigan,” or some other location.
It is the same for many French truckers who operate in Anglophone North America. They are surrounded by people who speak English, so typically they either are bilingual or have picked up enough English to get along when they inevitably haul product into the rest of Canada or south into the United States. Stories of les camionneurs causing trouble on the roads of English-speaking Canada or in the United States are nevertheless rare to nonexistent because of the self-regulation that was for a long time practiced by trucking-company owners in Québec. These folks were wise enough not to send drivers into the rest of the continent who had no hope of communicating with staff at shippers or receivers or being able to read road signs warning of construction, high winds, or chain-up advisories for mountain passes. U.S. Customs officials at border crossings are not required to speak French, and it has been the law of the land in the United States since 1937, when Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations were first outlined, that anyone who holds a commercial driver’s license “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records.”
Over the years, this rule’s enforcement may have been massaged with latitude and interpretation in those parts of the country where French- or Spanish-speaking truckers are often found (the Northeast and Southwest, respectively). In general, however, English has been the official lingua franca of the interstate if you want the privilege of driving a truck, and it was enforceable by roadside testing, which, if failed, could place a driver “out of service” (OOS), no longer legally permitted to operate a commercial motor vehicle and forced to leave the truck in need of rescue. Imagine the logistics and cost involved of a Québec-based carrier having to send another driver to Arizona to rescue a truckload of lettuce parked by the cops because the driver couldn’t communicate to the level of federal requirements.
A curious change to the enforcement of this regulation took place in 2016, nearly eighty years after it was first outlined. In the waning days of the Obama Administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration sent out a memorandum creating a substantial loophole—large enough, you might say, to drive a truck through any Big, Beautiful Walls. The memorandum, dated June 15, 2016, reads: “This policy removes the requirement to place drivers out of service for English Language proficiency violations and changes the agency’s standard for determining non-compliance based on . . . direction from Office of the Secretary and the Department of Justice.” The memorandum also informs us that the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, a group comprising trucking-enforcement-agency members across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, had an internal vote among themselves and, rather than following the rules as written, would “remove 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2) from their out of service criteria because they could not substantiate the safety impact.”
Unfortunately for everyone other than road bureaucrats, almost immediately after enforcement of this regulation ceased, America’s highways became more dangerous, for the less scrupulous members of the trucking industry figured out ways to employ insourced labor illiterate in the English language—and perhaps ignorant of the fact that they were being taken advantage of to undercut the wages of American truckers. (Though I am sure there are more than enough insourced truckers who give not a whit for the Americans whom they are displacing; the remittances they earn generally go a long way wherever they came from.)
Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows a reduction in truck-involved collisions and resulting fatalities on American roads up to 2009, but they have been on the rise ever since. As an aside, the FMCSA’s annual truck and bus crash data reports are stalled at 2021 because the agency changed the methodology used to measure crashes, discounting less serious crashes in what some call an attempt to skew numbers. The number of fatal crashes, however, has been rising every year since 2016, with only one blip in 2020 due to COVID.
Read more by purchasing End of the Road.
