People

Balwinder Kaur Gill:
Keep On Truckin'!

by RAVEENA AULAKH

 

The rain is coming down in torrents as Balwinder Kaur Gill pulls her silver Corolla into the Mattu Transport Inc. yard in Mississauga (Ontario, Canada). She grabs an iron rod from the trunk and dashes toward a truck. She crawls between the front tires and knocks off chunks of icy snow beneath.

A mechanic tells her he has already checked the tires, oil and wiper fluid. Balwinder nods but checks the air pressure in the ten tires anyway. And the oil. And the wiper fluid.

"I trust him, but I still like to check everything before I leave," she says, swinging into the cab to pick up her trailer and the load for Montreal.

Daljit Singh Dhillon, the mechanic, watches her leave in a blur of rain and mist. "Most drivers would've taken our word; not her," he says in Punjabi. "She's good."

For reasons cultural and otherwise, Balwinder, 32, is one of the few Sikh-Canadian women in the Greater Toronto Area who drive tractor-trailers - an industry increasingly dominated by Sikh-Canadian men.

Women, in general, probably make up less than 15 per cent of truck drivers, says Doug Switzer of the Ontario Trucking Association. "Women driving trucks is a minority. Sikh-Canadian women driving trucks is extraordinary."

Nachhattar Singh Chohan, president of the recently formed Indian Trucking Association, says more than 65 per cent of truck drivers in the GTA are Sikh-Canadians. Out of those thousands there are, probably, a couple of dozen women who drive with their husbands.

Few drive alone. A dozen, at most. Balwinder is one of them.

As a child, she took a long time to learn to ride a bicycle.

Having grown up in a dusty village in Punjab, she remembers the red bike her father, Lashkar Singh, bought when she was about nine. She had begged for it, but she wouldn't get on it even though it had training wheels. "I was petrified," she says.

It was months before she mustered the courage to ride it, and she never did learn to ride a scooter or drive a car in India.

When she came to Canada in 2000, she marvelled that everyone, just everyone, drove, and was convinced she couldn't, ever. She once told a friend Toronto's roads were like racetracks. It wasn't like the unhurried traffic in Punjab, where cars, scooters and bicycles share pot-holed roads with stray dogs, abandoned cattle and even pigs.

She worked at a plastics factory in Woodbridge. She bused to work from Brampton and didn't mind the hour it took. But the night shift was a challenge - she didn't know how to get home at 3 a.m. Sometimes she called a cab, or friends picked her up. Mostly she hung out till 5 a.m., when buses started.

Almost 15 months after arriving in Canada, Balwinder signed up for driving lessons.

It wasn't as frightening as she had thought. "I knew it was necessary to learn," she says. "It was getting really tough to manage without a car."

Truck driving happened by fluke, almost as a joke. She was visiting a cousin in Rexdale one day in 2005 when she saw forms on his table for a trucker's licence. "I don't know how it happened, but I told him that I would apply for it," says Balwinder.

He laughed, saying women don't drive trucks. It wasn't a dare, just a matter-of-fact statement. "That's when I knew I would. I wasn't angry, just determined," says Balwinder.

She bought the rules booklet, and within a week had taken the written test and signed up at Hi-Tech Driving School in Mississauga. For three months, she took lessons five days a week while working full time.

It was tough: There were 15 gears; turning left required more accuracy than she had imagined; and reversing with a trailer was a challenge that reduced her to tears.

The first time she took the driving test, she could not reverse correctly. The second time, she got nervous and could not change gears. The third time, she got it. She quit her factory job the same evening.

A few days later, Narinderjit Singh Mattu hired her.

Narinderjit owns 27 trucks and 40 trailers and employs 28 drivers. Balwinder is the only woman.

Narinderjit signed her up minutes after taking her for a road test. "I also thought that if I hire her, other (Sikh-Canadian) women will also think about it," he recalls.

That didn't happen.

Sikh-Canadians tend to consider driving even a cab not "suitable" for women. Among India's 1 billion citizens, there are very few - possibly none - who drive trucks or buses, points out Narinderjit.

The stigma attached to it means even women who drive with their husbands rarely admit to it, he says. "Women don't want to be known as truck drivers. It's not counted as a great profession; there are too many misconceptions about it."

While there are advantages to such non-traditional careers for women, there are hurdles. One is discrimination, or even harassment, on the part of co-workers.

Narinderjit recalls an incident where a female driver was verbally harassed by a group of drivers at a truck stop. It upset her enough to make her want to quit, but with a family to support, she couldn't. "She stopped telling people she drives a truck."

Balwinder doesn't tell anyone about it unless she's asked.

"I don't hide the fact, but I don't advertise it, either," she says.

She recalls a wedding reception in Brampton in July when a casual conversation about her driving experiences turned heated. Someone told her in Punjabi: "It's not what girls from good homes do."

She was livid. "No one talks about women being beaten up by their husbands, but this ... people are so quick to judge you."

But Balwinder, who knows she's being watched in the community, is careful about how she conducts herself.

"I don't hang out with other drivers," she says. "I take the load to Montreal, unload it and get another load back to Toronto. That's my life."

 

It's about 6 pm and Balwinder is pulling into a loading yard on Tomken Road in Brampton, where dozens of trailers are parked.

Her 16-metre trailer is ready. She reverses the truck gently. There's a loud grating noise as it locks onto the trailer. Balwinder, who is five-foot-six and muscular - she works out at LA Fitness in Brampton every weekend - slips on a woollen toque and thick right glove and deftly climbs between truck and trailer to secure the three hefty cables that run the lights, air brakes and signals.

She takes her time; she's heard too many stories about trailers getting unhooked while on the road.

Her cargo can be anything from hospital supplies to dry food. Today, she's taking a shipment for Shoppers Drug Mart.

She climbs into the cab to complete paperwork - the only annoying thing about the job, she says. An hour later, she's on Highway 401 bound for Montreal.

Truck drivers call Balwinder's rig "the road plane." They say the 18-wheeler glides on bumpy asphalt roads - not because it's new and automatic but the way she drives it: smoothly.

Balwinder, who goes to Montreal five times a week, says that when she started long-haul driving a year ago, it was tough physically.

A typical run to Montreal takes six to seven hours, but up to twelve hours during a blizzard, causing cramps and body pain: "My eyes used to hurt from looking straight ahead for hours." And she missed being home - a basement in Malton - every night.

Now, it's a piece of cake.

She's passing through Bowmanville. It's raining steadily and the wind is howling as the truck cruises at 100 kilometres an hour in the centre lane. Suddenly, an SUV changes lanes right in front of her. Balwinder swears loudly, then gently presses on the brakes.

"Car drivers don't understand that it takes a truck some time to stop," she explains. If she slams on the brakes, the truck can jackknife - every driver's nightmare.

She's never crashed, but has heard the stories. The closest she came was in 2005, a few months after she started. She was taking a load to Cambridge, when the trailer got stuck turning left. Drivers stopped, looked and took a detour, but no one could help her. An hour later, when she was ready to call a tow truck she could barely afford, the manager of a trucking company who was passing by told her he was sending the company's tow truck.

She didn't have to pay a cent.

But that was the last time she needed help. Except in the case of a breakdown, she's never needed help. "I've learned to do everything myself - I don't want to be dependent on anyone."

 

She reaches Laval, Quebec, a few minutes past midnight. There's a thick layer of ice as she arrives at Sonar Transport's dockyard. Deftly, she reverses toward an open dock. There's a loud thud as the trailer docks. She jumps out to tell the night staff they can unload.

Language can be a challenge for Balwinder, a high-school dropout. She speaks enough English for basic communication but in Laval-Montreal, where everything's in French, hand gestures do wonders.

An hour later, the trailer is empty.

She usually sleeps in the cab, picks up a new load around dawn and heads back to Toronto. There are two bunks, a tiny refrigerator and space for food, clothes and shoes. She takes out her dinner - veggies, lentils, yogurt and Punjabi flatbread - and heats it on a small stove.

"It's not an easy life. There is a lot of struggle but it's steady money," says Balwinder, who earns $50,000 to $55,000 a year. That can change anytime. In the past eight months, she's seen the number of trucks on the road decrease and feels lucky she still has work five days a week.

She sends money monthly to her parents in Punjab. They know she drives a truck and are proud of her. "My father used to work in a factory where truck and bus bodies were built," she says, curling up in bed.

She barely has five hours before she's due to pick up a load of shopping carts from Montreal.

Gilles Jolicoeur is waiting for her at Cari All, a warehouse on Industrial Blvd. The first time she met him, he gawked and asked her if she really drove the truck.

"She was the first Sikh-Canadian (female) driver I'd met," says Jolicoeur, adding that, unlike most drivers, "She's very punctual and professional. If she says she'll be here at 6 a.m., you can bet she'll be five minutes early."

As the carts are being loaded, Balwinder quickly makes tea on the stove and sips it standing outside. "The first time I came to Montreal, I remember looking at the trailer after it was unloaded. I couldn't believe I'd driven it here. I still have the same feeling sometimes."

Minutes later, she's on her way to Toronto.

 

[Courtesy: The Toronto Star]

January 3, 2009

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