by Canadian Sailings | Aug 29, 2018 | Business and Economy, Gateways and Corridors, Government and Regulation, Keith Norbury, Other, Supply Chain and Logistics
By Keith Norbury
If the two Canadian provinces and eight U.S. states that make up the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway region formed their own country, it would boast the world’s third largest economy. That was one of the notable observations in a recent report commissioned by Chamber of Marine Commerce, an Ottawa-based bi-national association representing shipowners and operators, ports, shippers, and other marine-related companies.
The region’s annual GDP of over US$6 trillion — exceeded only by the U.S. and China — includes domestic cargo moved on either side of the border, and cargo bound for or arriving from overseas. But a fair chunk of that is trade across the border — trade that many transportation industry insiders and experts fear will suffer from the tariff war that has erupted between Canada and the U.S. (more…)
by Canadian Sailings | Jul 4, 2018 | Business and Economy, Corporate events & profiles, Keith Norbury, Other
By Keith Norbury
“Technology” is the best word to describe how freight forwarding has changed over the years, says Kim Gallacher, ocean freight manager for Montréal-based Delmar International Inc. “When I started, there was no Internet,” said Ms. Gallacher who has been in the business for over a quarter century, the last eight years with Delmar. “We typed bills of lading or manifests by hand on typewriters with carbon paper. If you made a mistake at the last minute, you’d have to do it all over again.”
She would look forward to the arrival of Canadian Sailings magazine on her desk because it was then the only way to check the shipping schedules. “There were no online schedules,” Ms. Gallacher said.
Making an overseas phone call was also much more difficult than it is today, and “Telex machines were one of our main sources of communication with our overseas offices,” Ms. Gallacher said.
Award honours female leaders
In recognition of her role as a female leader in the industry, Ms. Gallacher received CIFFA’s inaugural Donna Letterio Leadership Award in 2015. The award is named for CIFFA’s first and still only female President, who died from bladder cancer in 2013 near the end of her two-year term. Ms. Gallacher described winning the award as a “career-making moment.” She is also proud to have known Ms. Letterio from having met her at industry functions and training sessions over the years. “She was a mentor,” Ms. Gallacher said, noting that Ms. Letterio rose from the ranks of the industry to become CEO of DHL Global Forwarding (Canada) Inc. “Like all of us, she learned through CIFFA courses and working in the business, in the trenches,” Ms. Gallacher said.
Fast forward to 2018, and “Delmar is on the forefront of going paperless,” she said. That includes being fully engaged and automated with the Canadian Border Services Agency’s eManifest system.
Anticipated impacts
On the horizon is the anticipated introduction of blockchain technology, which Ms. Gallacher has been reading up on. “It’s not a simple thing and not to be taken lightly,” Ms. Gallacher said. Based on her research to date, Ms. Gallacher said blockchain “has the potential to greatly increase transaction efficiencies between international parties.” However, she said, it’s too early to know what benefits and risks the technology poses for her industry. “The key is balancing the benefit and the risk and finding out what works,” Ms. Gallacher said. “Maybe what works for one company doesn’t work for another. Or there could be an industry standard that’s formed. I think it’s really too early in the conversation to be speculating.”
Also expected to have an impact on the industry in the not-so-distant future are autonomous vehicles, the expanded reach of Amazon, and the potential for Uber- or Airbnb-type disruptions. Ms. Gallacher expresses confidence that those upstarts won’t make freight forwarding obsolete, however. “I have a biased opinion, and I think that our group of freight forwarders is highly professional and highly knowledgeable and highly connected globally,” Ms. Gallacher said. “So, again, my biased opinion is I would find it hard to believe that somebody could just jump in here and do that.”
Different approaches
What she does anticipate is for more young people and women to jump into the profession. As someone who supervises a team of more than a dozen workers of various ages, she said “it’s all true” that millennials and baby boomers require different approaches in the workplace. The increasing numbers of women, meanwhile, “is a wonderful thing,” she said. “Twenty years ago in the industry, women were far outnumbered by men, and that’s just not the case today,” she said. Looking ahead, Ms. Gallacher expects to see even more women in her profession. Ideally, she would like those numbers to reflect the general population. “For example, if women are 55 per cent in the world there should be 55 per cent women in your company,” Ms. Gallacher said.
She would also like to serve on CIFFA’s Board one day. She already contributes to the association’s advocacy efforts by serving on its National Seafreight Committee and on the CBSA’s Working Group Subcommittee.
Back in Canada
The most recent winner of the Donna Letterio Leadership Award, Lucia Pinheiro, said she was “honoured and humbled” to receive the award this April. When Ms. Pinheiro returned to Canada in 2013 after about 15 years abroad, she heard a lot about Ms. Letterio’s contributions to the industry. Ms. Pinheiro has been country manager and President of Damco Canada since April 2013. This February she added “area CEO for the U.S. West Coast” to her title. In Canada, she oversees about 60 employees at Damco’s freight forwarding, logistics and customs operations. Including its distribution division, Damco has 150 employees across Canada. Internationally, the company employs more than 10,000 people in more than 100 countries. Damco is part of A.P. Moller – Maersk.
It was with Maersk Sealand Canada that Ms. Pinheiro got her start in the business as an account coordinator. Then her career took her to exotic locales such as Singapore and Dubai, where she discovered that women lead many of the management teams.
“Coming back to Canada, I became very aware of the fact that I was in the minority,” she said, although she has already noticed improvements in the number of women in the industry. Ms. Pinheiro has also happily noticed improvements in formal education in the industry. “Twenty years ago when I came out of school, there were no programs for logistics or international transportation,” she said.
Happy career choice
Ms. Pinheiro graduated with a business degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1997, with an eye toward a banking career. At the time, she was also working with her family’s janitorial business in London, Ont., when Maersk recruited her. “I’m super super happy that I chose transportation. It’s taken me all over the world,” said Ms. Pinheiro, whose familial roots are on the Azores Island of Faial and who is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, French, and English.
Looking ahead, she predicts massive disruptions coming in her industry. “And it’s not from who you would traditionally say would be a competitor,” Ms. Pinheiro said. “It’s technology companies. It’s data. It’s big data. It’s blockchain. Since the beginning of time, our industry has been one that’s extremely fragmented, extremely manual, paper-based, (and) very, very traditional when it comes to the various steps and parties involved in international freight and international logistics.” She cited the example of eManifest, which the Canada Border Services Agency has been working to roll out since before her return to Canada “and we still don’t have it off the ground,” she said.
99.99 per cent paperless
Her company, however, has made eManifest a priority and is now “99.99 per cent” of the way to being paperless. “I feel pretty good that our team has delivered all the milestones that we need to deliver,” Ms. Pinheiro said. “But we’re also at the mercy of the Canadian government.”
When it comes to blockchain, Damco’s parent company is at the forefront, having recently forged a joint venture with IBM. Ms. Pinheiro wasn’t at liberty to discuss the timeline for blockchain’s implementation, though. “But I can tell you that we’re very excited about it.” Among the exciting promises of blockchain is that it will enable seamless tracking of cargo shipments. “You will be able to track immediately where a container is in the process, and what documentation is linked to it,” Ms. Pinheiro explained. “You won’t have to send 80 emails to 100 different parties to track it down.”
by Canadian Sailings | Jul 4, 2018 | Business and Economy, Keith Norbury, Other
By Keith Norbury
What does the future of freight forwarding look like in Canada? Let’s ask recent winners of the Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association’s annual Young International Freight Forwarder of the Year competition. The 2017 winner, Bradley Davis — who went on to win the global YIFFY award — said he wishes he had a crystal ball. Even without one, he said, “I definitely see a lot of the trucking industry starting to move towards autonomous vehicles.” He also envisions information technology platforms enabling forwarders “to go after a lot of the customers that are your onesie-twosies that can be worked automatically through a system.” And he expects to see more consolidation in the industry as large companies acquire small and medium-sized forwarders. (more…)
by Canadian Sailings | Jul 4, 2018 | Business and Economy, Keith Norbury, Other
By Keith Norbury
Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association will celebrate its 70th anniversary in style with a full-fledged conference in Toronto this October. The theme of the gathering, which takes place Oct. 16 and 17 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, is Global Supply Chains in a Digital Future: innovation and inspiration. “It’s very much dealing about e-commerce, last-mile deliveries, drones, automated vehicles, transparency, freight forwarders’ systems, and how do you provide visibility to your customers,” said Ruth Snowden, CIFFA’s Executive Director.
(more…)
by Canadian Sailings | Jul 4, 2018 | Business and Economy, Corporate events & profiles, Keith Norbury, Other
By Keith Norbury
About 3,000 learners now enroll annually in educational programs offered by Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association, says Stephen McDermott, CIFFA’s Director of Education and Marketing. About half of those are through partner educational institutions and about half through CIFFA directly. The latter are now conducted entirely online.
“We don’t just eliminate the paper-based or classroom-based training for the sake of it,” Mr. McDermott said. “We really do analyze what makes sense for the learner and how they can learn best. And we still do offer certain courses in class.”
CIFFA courses are now on the calendars of about a dozen colleges across Canada, about twice as many as when Mr. McDermott joined the association six years ago. The objective is to sign two new valid educational partners a year, he said. “Our goal within the colleges is to have our programs integrated with a lot of college programs so that when our members are hiring graduates, they know that they are also hiring graduates that have the CIFFA certificate,” Mr. McDermott said.
Langara offers CIFFA training
One of CIFFA’s newer educational partners is Langara College in Vancouver, B.C. Graduates of Langara’s Supply Chain and Logistics Post-Degree Diploma receive a certificate from CIFFA if they meet the requirements of two associated courses — Essentials of Freight Forwarding, and International Transportation and Trade — and successfully challenge the CIFFA exams, said the college’s Phuoi-Linh To.
“Students complete the exams as part of the ITT and EFF courses, which are taken within the program,” said Ms. To, who is a program manager of accounting, business and computer technology in the Continuing Studies department. The program, which is full-time over two years and encompasses six semesters, had its first intake in May 2016; and it first offered the CIFFA courses in May 2017. “We’ve had three cohorts completing their CIFFA certification courses, with over 40 students having the opportunity to achieve their certification,” Ms. To said.
The program accepts 25 to 30 students per cohort, she said. Students from the May 2016 intake graduated this April. Four other cohorts, totalling about 100 students, are in various stages of the program, she said. Cost for the entire diploma program, which includes a work practicum, is $13,000 for domestic students. That also covers exam fees but not textbooks.
The program has two intakes per year, with admission for this September already fully booked. Admissions for January 2019 are now open. “The number of open spots depends on our admission review process that is underway,” Ms. To said.
Admission requirements include a three- or four-years bachelor’s degree or equivalent, as well as demonstrated proficiency in English.
Experienced instructor
Jie (Jackie) Li, a member of Langara’s continuing studies faculty and a program head at B.C. Institute of Technology, is the lead instructor for the CIFFA courses. A certified CIFFA instructor, Mr. Li has more than a decade of experience in international business and logistics in transportation. He currently serves on the Pacific chapter Board of Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport International, and with the Vancouver area council of the Canadian Institute of Traffic and Transportation.
“The program has been very well received by the industry,” Ms. To said, noting that the college has 15 industry partners, including CIFFA members, which provide the eight- to 10-week practicum placements for the students. The college is looking for new work-placement partners in Metro Vancouver for the next practicum sessions in September. Ms. To invites interested organizations to contact the college.
Job opportunities plentiful
“Supply chain jobs are always plentiful, it seems, especially in entry-level positions,” Mr. Dermott said. He noted that CIFFA has 260 member companies in the industry. Including non-CIFFA members, the freight forwarding industry employs 30,000 to 40,000, he estimates. CIFFA also has a new jobs link called CareerConnect on its website.
“If you Google ‘supply chain jobs’ or ‘freight forwarding jobs,’ it’s pages and pages of jobs,” Mr. McDermott said. “So there are lots of opportunities.”
CIFFA’s other educational partners include George Brown College, Seneca College, triOS College, Eastern College, Brighton College, St. Clair College, Eastern College, the National Academy of Health and Business, Universal Learning Institute, Centennial College, and Discovery Community College. “It’s partnerships that we individually sign with each college and they contribute to the employment of their students,” Mr. McDermott said. “And our members will occasionally go to those colleges and hire those students directly.”
The programs vary from college to college. Some offer the certification as part of a diploma program in supply chain and logistics. For example, Langara’s program is run by Supply Chain Management B.C. “But they also graduate with a certificate from CIFFA because we have our own standards of what constitutes a pass compared to what the colleges might,” Mr. McDermott said.
Textbooks turn electronic
CIFFA is moving away from printed textbooks. The association now uses an app called Texidium, which delivers electronic textbooks to colleges in Canada and the U.S. Texidium, from Ottawa-based Kivuto Solutions Inc., can be installed on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. “It’s a much easier way for us to distribute the books and keep the books updated,” Mr. McDermott said. “It even offers a lot of opportunities for instructors to create groups within the app or give out additional details or answer questions. And, for the student, it’s an entirely searchable textbook. It also has text speech.” CIFFA found out about Texidium from Sarnia, Ont.-based Lambton College, one of the association’s newest educational partners. “They’ve just recently started their enrolment of students,” Mr. McDermott said.
A requirement with all the colleges is that students must write and pass CIFFA’s exams independently of the college programs. “Our contracts and agreements with the colleges are all very detailed and checked by both parties so that we can ensure that the students get the fairest possible enrollment and they understand exactly what they have to do to secure the CIFFA certificate.”
Two types of online learning
For its own programs, CIFFA offers two types of online courses — e-learning on demand, and virtual classrooms. The former allows students to work at their own pace. “We give each course about three months to finish but there are students that finish it in three weeks,” Mr. McDermott said.
The virtual classrooms are more scheduled and include live weekly sessions in which the students hear the instructor in real time. “The e-learning on demand gets all of the educational offerings that the virtual class gets,” Mr. McDermott said. “The only difference is one is live and one is recorded.”
To earn what is informally known as the CIFFA certificate, a student must complete two introductory freight forwarding courses and the related exams. The fee for each of those courses — Essentials of Freight Forwarding, and International Transportation and Trade — is $525 plus tax for employees of CIFFA members, and $690 plus tax for non-member employees.
CIFFA’s ultimate educational goal is its Professional Freight Forwarder designation, or PFF. To achieve the PFF requires first earning the CIFFA certificate. A second prerequisite is earning the advanced level certificate. The third is completing the three courses of a CIFFA program designed by the Schulich Executive Education Centre of Toronto’s York University. “Then you need five years experience working with a freight forwarder, and that gives you the professional freight forwarder designation,” Mr. McDermott explained.
Schulich courses now online
Courses in the Schulich program were originally delivered in the classroom. But it proved difficult for people to take time off work to attend the class, Mr. McDermott said. Moving it online has enabled students to take part in the course in the evenings. They can also do it from anywhere in the country. “We found our enrollment has actually gone up as a result,” Mr. McDermott said.
Teaching two of the three Schulich courses is Sanjay Dhebar, an instructor at the Schulich School of Business who developed the course materials, which CIFFA purchased. His courses are entitled Sales Strategies for the Non-Sales Manager and Building a Strong Customer Service Culture for Your Organization. I didn’t even know about CIFFA until they approached us,” said Mr. Dhebar, who has an MBA from the University of Leicester and industry experience that includes four years as national sales director with LifeLabs Medical Laboratory Services.
Getting to know the business
He was impressed that CIFFA wanted to partner with Schulich, which he called “the number one MBA program in Canada.” However, he admits that he didn’t know a lot about freight forwarding. “I had to get to know all that,” Mr. Dhebar said. So he talked with people in the industry, including at large players like DB Schenker, but also at small and medium sized firms. “I’ve got to know the business,” Mr. Dhebar said. However, he realizes that he’s not going to teach his students, many of whom have years of experience in freight forwarding, any of the bolts and nuts about their particular profession. “That’s not my role – my role is more on this is what’s happening in other businesses (and) what best practices can be applied to freight forwarding.”
Connecting via Adobe
“Online you’re limited on the level of dialogue you can have with people from a live audience,” Mr. Dhebar said. “One thing I will say is CIFFA made a good investment in technology. They use Adobe Connect.” Each weekend, he releases a 45-minute lecture that the students can listen to on their own schedules. Then each Wednesday evening, he conducts a live one-hour online lecture with the class, which typically numbers around 15 students.
For the online lectures, the students can hear him in real time. However, if they have any questions, they have to submit them by text through Adobe Connect’s chat function. He can also give quizzes during the lecture and have the students break off into smaller groups to chat about certain subjects and then return to the main group. “I do a blend of academics and some theory, like with some case studies and academic rigour,” Mr. Dhebar said. “But then I bring in my experiences and the clients I’ve worked with.”
Building bench strength
Ruth Snowden, CIFFA’s Executive Director, said taking the Schulich program is an “exciting” move that will help companies build their “bench strength,” identify “the up and comers” and invest in the non-technical management skills of freight forwarding. “Now it doesn’t matter where you are in the country, you have access to this management education and training,” Ms. Snowden said.
Mr. McDermott said many member companies use CIFFA programs as their initial training and pay for their employees to take them. “The best example is Kuehne + Nagel, which is a massive international company,” Mr. McDermott said. Among the teaching assistants on CIFFA’s Schulich programs is Bradley Davis, a national trade lane special with Kuehne + Nagel in Toronto. “He’s really strong,” Mr. McDermott said. “He’s not just a recent graduate but he finished with highest grades.” He was also the winner of the 2017 Young International Freight Forwarder of the Year competition from FIATA, the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations. Mr. Davis said his teaching assistant gig with CIFFA “was pretty fun” and “a nice little change from the day to day of what I do.”
Continuous learning
Kim Gallacher, ocean freight manager for Montréal-based Delmar International Inc., said CIFFA excels at continuous learning. “Certainly there are other programs available from community colleges these days. And some at a university level,” Ms. Gallacher said. “Yet when I started in the business there was no such thing. There was only CIFFA.”
She herself took CIFFA certificate programs in the late 1980s. Aside from working for a CIFFA member company, Ms. Gallacher is also an individual CIFFA member by virtue of having achieved the professional freight forwarder designation in 2006. Ms. Gallacher has also taught CIFFA courses, such as an export essentials workshop, as well as courses at Seneca College on export letters of credit and international banking. “In a management position at any company, you’re doing a certain amount of training and internal training with your staff on an ongoing basis, whether it’s company policies or industry regulatatory changes,” Ms. Gallacher said. “It’s a continuous learning process and that’s something that CIFFA supports in a great way.”
Quartet of textbooks
For its freight-forwarding courses, CIFFA uses four textbooks that were written over the last few decades by subject matter experts, who have taught CIFFA courses and who volunteered their expertise to certain chapters. “So we could have a customs chapter written by a customs expert,” Mr. McDermott said. “We could have our air freight chapter written by several air freight experts. And over the years it’s become more and more refined.” One of the authors is longtime instructor Fred Grootarz, President of Acro Navigation Inc. He wrote some of the textbooks early on and also for the advanced courses that he teaches today. “But all that needs to be rewritten because the industry doesn’t stand still, you know,” said Mr. Grootarz, who started in the business in 1964 in his native Germany, but has been in Canada since 1970. He now teaches only advanced classes on such subjects as vessel chartering, air freight chartering, and project shipping.
One topic that CIFFA has its eye on for integrating into its education is blockchain. Another hot topic is marijuana, which Canada will legalize for recreational purposes this year. CIFFA is considering a workshop in the near future on how legal marijuana producers in Canada might go about exporting their products to other countries. “Finding out exactly how they do that from a legal perspective and everything that goes into that would be fascinating,” Mr. McDermott said.
by Canadian Sailings | Jul 4, 2018 | Corporate events & profiles, Keith Norbury, Supply Chain and Logistics
By Keith Norbury
On the wall of his office, Chris Gillespie displays the first budget that his grandfather established when he founded Gillespie-Munro Forwarders Ltd. in 1947. “They estimated gross income of $3,000 a month, with expenses of about $2,830 a month. So the estimated net income was $170 a month.” In the ensuing years, Montreal-based Gillespie-Munro Inc. has grown considerably. The company has gone from nine employees, including his grandfather and an “extra man,” to nearly a hundred. “We’re like a $10 million revenue a year company. So it’s gone up quite a bit,” he quipped.
The Canadian freight forwarding industry has also changed dramatically in the last seven decades, as has the association that represents it. “We could never do the volume of business we do today without computerization,” Mr. Gillespie said.
Celebrating 70 years
A year after founding his company, Douglas Barwick Gillespie became the first President of Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2018. “My grandfather would have been pretty impressed with how the business had changed,” said Mr. Gillespie, who succeeded his father, Douglas Russell Gillespie, as President and CEO of Gillespie-Munro around 1980.
Like his grandfather and father, Mr. Gillespie also served as CIFFA President. His dad held the post in 1970 while the younger Gillespie did the honours in 1987 and 1989, his tenure interrupted because CIFFA bylaws at the time prohibited anyone for holding the office for consecutive years. “I was honoured by being the first third generation President of CIFFA,” Mr. Gillespie said.
Another former CIFFA President with a familial connection to the founders is Bill Gottlieb, who led the association in 1994. His uncle, Arthur Nathan Kirsch, was the association’s first Treasurer. Arthur was the son of David Kirsch, a Lithuanian immigrant who founded David Kirsch Forwarders Ltd. and was Mr. Gottlieb’s grandfather. Mr. Gottlieb eventually succeeded his uncle as Kirsch’ President.
“I joined the company back in 1975 full time, and his advice to me was if you want to learn the business or what goes on around you, you should get involved with the forwarding association,” Mr. Gottlieb said. He sold his interest in the family business in 2013 and since 2015 has been the Eastern Canada Director for ITN Logistics Services Inc.
Both Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Gottlieb also served two-years terms as President of FIATA, the international body of freight forwarders associations. Mr. Gillespie was FIATA President from 1999 to 2001, while Mr. Gottlieb’s term was from 2007 to 2009.
Eight founding members
CIFFA itself had eight charter members. Aside from D.B. Gillespie and A.N. Kirsch, the others were Vice-President J.A. Nuttall of A.W. Kyle Company; Secretary J.M. Dever of Wm. H. Johnson Jr. Ltd.; and Directors B.V. Abrahams of Guy Tombs Ltd.; and J.O. Stratton of Thomas Meadows & Co. Canada Ltd., according to clippings from the Journal of Commerce and the Shipping Digest.
Those eight names are on CIFFA’s original articles of incorporation, said Ruth Snowden, the association’s Executive Director since 2008. “By February 1949, there were 15 paid up members,” she said.
Today the association has about 260 member companies as well as about 160 associated members from outside of freight forwarding. Those numbers have about doubled in the decade that Snowden has been at the association. “Part of the role of the association was to petition Parliament and to represent the international freight forwarder,” said Ms. Snowden, who worked in freight forwarding for about 25 years before taking on her current role. “Fast forward over the years and we have this association, CIFFA, where we have a very strong advocacy role.”
CIFFA no longer petitions Parliament and it seldom engages with federal cabinet ministers “except when we have to,” Ms. Snowden said. For example, CIFFA wrote to federal Transportation Minister Marc Garneau and International Trade Minister François-Philippe Champagne this March regarding delays in the movement of intermodal cargo and to ask the government to address intermodal infrastructure by moving ahead on spending money pledged in a $2 billion National Trade Corridors Fund.
“Seventy years ago, these guys got together and formed this association and here we are fast forward 70 years later and we’re still petitioning ministers of the Crown to improve the facilitation of the movement of goods,” Ms. Snowden said.
According to those yellowed clippings, the association’s objective was “to support and protect Canadian freight forwarders and their clients by establishing uniform trade practices and regulations and eliminating trade evils and abuses.”
Mr. Gottlieb said the association started because those in the industry decided they needed a way to voice their concerns with port authorities and steamship companies about the role of freight forwarders, who often worked on commission.
Before containerization
“Remember, there were no containers back then; everything was loose freight,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “So they’d get a commission. In some cases it would be per piece. Other times it would be a percentage of the freight.”
Freight forwarders of the day also had issues with how cargo was handled. In those days, it was all manual, often by longshoremen using hooks. “Part of the commodities that we were moving at the time were textiles for the garment trade,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “So you can imagine what one of those hooks going into a roll would do to the fabric.”
The association also enabled members to air their issues, sometimes in ways that are now frowned upon by authorities. “Back in the 40s, I will use the word, they could ‘collude’ like they can’t do today,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “When I first got involved with CIFFA there were still fee schedules on the customs broker’s side and there were also fee schedules on the forwarding side. Those have since been discontinued many years ago because they are deemed to be anti-competitive.”
A fascinating business
After he finished his studies in international business at Northern Illinois University, Mr. Gottlieb followed his grandmother’s advice and came to Canada to give freight forwarding a try. “I decided what the heck, I’m young. I came up for a year on the basis that I’d give it a go for a year and bottom line is it’s a fascinating business,” Mr. Gottlieb said. Forty-five years later, he is still in the business. He is also mentoring the fourth generation of his family in the profession, his son Brian.
But how the work of a freight forwarder has changed in the last seven decades!
Forty-five years ago, the garment and footwear industries were huge in Montreal. Today almost all that manufacturing is offshore. “And what we have left are basically importers and distributors,” Mr. Gottlieb said. He has heard stories for years about a similar death knell for freight forwarding, going back to the early days of Federal Express. But he considers that obituary to be premature.
“Forwarders do a lot besides just consumer goods,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “We’re moving machinery. We’re moving liquid enzymes. We’re all over the place. We’re using dangerous goods, explosives, hazardous chemicals, etc.” Meanwhile, the rise of electronic commerce giants like Amazon has renewed worries. Yet it also presents opportunities for forwarders. “We have several clients that are supplying the Amazons,” he said “They’re shipping in bulk, over to China for Alibaba, as well as trucking to Costco, etc.”
Ditto machine recalled
One of Mr. Gillespie’s first jobs was to run the ditto machine, or spirit duplicator, to fill the machine “with that great smelling” (alcohol) liquid. Meanwhile, the women who typed the documents “became very skilled with razor blades,” Mr. Gillespie said. “Instead of having to correct the whole text if they had typed something incorrectly, they’d go in and chip away at the ink that had been imprinted on the back of the page. They’d remove that section, then retype over that section (with) the correct information.” Typing a letter from dictation was a different matter. If his grandfather or his father wanted changes made to a letter, the secretary “had to go back and type it all over again,” Mr. Gillespie said.
His father, Douglas Russell Gillespie, became President of the company in the late 1960s and ran it for about a decade. Earlier, D.R. Gillespie had gone to work for a vessel agency that one of the two Munros in Gillespie-Munro had hived off of the original company.
“My grandfather was still working when I first started with the company working summers as an office boy,” said Mr. Gillespie, who was born in 1949. He can’t say whether his grandfather would be “impressed or distraught” by the myriad security regulations that freight forwarders now have to deal with but that didn’t exist when the company and CIFFA were founded. “Nor did they exist when I first started in the business,” Mr. Gillespie said.
He was referring specifically to global security measures implemented in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorists attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. “I’m talking about systems where governments want to know exactly what is coming into Canada” Mr. Gillespie said, and making sure such information is available and understandable, he said, citing dangerous goods as an example. “We’ve had instances in the last few years of ships catching fire and almost every instance of this happening can be traced back to either improperly packaged or incorrectly declared dangerous goods,” Mr. Gillespie said. For that reason, he always advises his clients to have adequate marine insurance. “For one reason, if you are on a ship that catches fire, or worse case scenario ends up being salvaged, there is a huge, huge amount of money that’s going to be involved in the bond that you’re going to have to put up to get your cargo released,” Mr. Gillespie said.
Breakbulk ship parties
Containerization was still taking its baby steps by the time he joined the industry in the 1960s. “I can still remember going to ship parties onboard breakbulk ships that would come into the port of Montreal and they’d be there for a week or more loading and discharging, whereas nowadays these ships turn around in a day or two. And they have to because the costs are just phenomenal,” Mr. Gillespie said.
When his father took over the company, the evolution to containerization was picking up steam and he took the business to the next level. “We always handled a lot of breakbulk cargo but all of that breakbulk cargo eventually moved to and is now for the most part carried in containers,” Mr. Gillespie said.
One of the driving forces behind the move to containerization was that it greatly reduced the risk of cargo damage and pilfering. “For example, the risk of damage to newsprint in breakbulk ships is much greater than if it’s been loaded stowed and secured by the shipper in the container at his premises, or by others that know how to do that,” said Mr. Gillespie, whose company still does much of its work with forest products.
Advocacy efforts
Much of CIFFA’s work, meanwhile, still involves advocating for improvements to Canada’s transportation infrastructure. For example, in a recent letter to federal Transportation Minister Marc Garneau and International Trade Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Ms. Snowden and current CIFFA President Gary Vince cited such problem areas as congestion at CN terminal operations in several central and western cities. “We felt that the federal government had to be made aware that the problems were not just in the movement of grain but that export containers and import containers were very much delayed,” Ms. Snowden told Canadian Sailings.
Meanwhile, CN Interim President and CEO J.J. Ruest responded promising improvements in dwell times and alleviation of congestion. CN also recently completed “a series of strategic investment decisions,” including ordering 38 cranes and 37 shunt tractors, and spending $250 million to increase track capacity between the West Coast and Chicago, not to mention significant additions and replacements of its fleet of grain and lumber cars. Ms. Snowden said part of the problem was that nobody expected such a huge jump in the movement of containers in 2017, such as the 11 per cent increase at the port of Vancouver. “The railroads, yes, they were prepared for a 2 or 3 or 4 per cent growth but they weren’t prepared for double digit growth and it hit early in the year,” Ms. Snowden said. “and they didn’t make the investments early in the year that they needed to in additional cranes, for example, building some longer sidings, and getting more rail cars and locomotives.”
The EManifest saga
Another area of advocacy that CIFFA has been involved with is the Canadian Border Services Agency’s electronic manifest system, or eManifest, for filing customs documents. The eManifest system, the third phase of CBSA’s Advance Commercial Information program, has been dogged by numerous missed deadlines and delays. CIFFA is waiting for CBSA to fix security gaps in its systems, she said. However, by the time the enhancements have been made and tested, she doubts that CBSA will be able to make the eManifest mandatory before the end of 2019.
A great decade
Ms. Snowden has been with CIFFA for a decade. “I came for five years in 2008, January 2008,” she said. Before that she worked in freight forwarding for 25 years, including as a Vice-President at UPS Supply Chain Solutions. She also did some consulting, including for Transport Canada. “I knew how to run a freight forwarding company,” Ms. Snowden said. “But I didn’t know much about managing an association. So I’ve learned a lot about managing an association. And, you know, we’ve had a great decade, I’ll tell you.”
The membership of CIFFA is always changing as companies merge, big ones absorb smaller ones, some go out of business, and new ones start up. Every year the association loses about four or five per cent of its membership, Ms. Snowden said. But then it acquires new members. To qualify for membership, a company has to have been in business in Canada for at least 36 months. A company also has to meet insurance and training requirements. “A lot of the small, new freight forwarders don’t meet our eligibility requirements,” she said.
What the future promises
Looking ahead, Ms. Snowden anticipates that blockchain — a subject on the agenda for the CIFFA conference in Toronto this October — “is going to enable us to transfer data and documents securely, and that’s going to, we hope, take away some paper out of the current paper system, and eliminate unnecessary data entry duplication.”
Blockchain is something Mr. Gillespie has been trying to wrap his head around.
“I guess one of the most interesting things I read somewhere was blockchain is great where you have high value, high security requirements, but that it’s probably not realistic to look at its application to commodities, per se,” Mr. Gillespie said. “I really don’t understand how it applies to transportation. I know that the carriers themselves are looking at using it but they don’t seem to be looking at using it for the actual fulfillment of their transportation function as much as other aspects of their operations.” Mr. Gillespie also has trouble imagining that self-driving vehicles will take over the roadways any time soon, noting some of the highly publicized troubles Tesla Motors has encountered.
What he does expect to see is more consolidation in transportation industries as well as more companies trying to be “all things to all people,” such as by doing warehousing and trucking. But whatever the future holds for transportation, he imagines a role in it for freight forwarders. “The manner in which you move it, or the approach you take to moving the cargo, is always going to be dependent on somebody — a human being who has the creativity and the knowledge to understand what that cargo is going to face.”
