One of the cultural nuances of North American road culture is the affinity for owning and driving a pickup truck. Despite their fuel inefficiency, expensive parts and unmatched purchase and running costs, trucks are actually pretty cool. You can haul a lot of stuff around (including some really fun recreational toys), travel up dirt roads passable by only the most formidable SUVs and best of all, you can ubiquitously utter the phrase “my truck.”
It’s taken me a long time to come around to the idea of owning a truck, mostly because of the aforementioned negative traits. But this year my partner and I finally caved and bought the Sea to Sky standard-issue mid-sized truck; a Toyota Tacoma. It’s one of the smaller trucks you can get in terms of size, power, payload capacity and presence, just a few reasons why Tacomas are often scoffed at by the legit full-size truck owners of the Ford-150, Chevy Silverado 1500 and RAM 1500 variety. But I’m not hauling a 30-foot travel trailer to a busy campsite, nor do I need to transport building materials or other such industrial applications. I just need to be able to drive up forestry roads without scraping on the cross ditches and move a new-to-me snowmobile around in the winter (more to come on that in a later column).
In the July 25, 2021 edition of The Globe and Mail, editors published an opinion article titled “Pickup trucks are a plague on Canadian streets.” Now a (rookie) truck owner, I read the article with a fresh perspective on these vehicles, somewhat taking the bait and pushing back against the opinionated controversy from some suit in Toronto. That said, I soon realized that I actually I agree with a lot of the author’s opinions and have for years. Driving a big truck in an urban environment that rarely sees utilitarian work, snowy roads or off-road travel seems ludicrous to me. But especially now that I’m a card-carrying contributor to the “plague” on Canadian streets, I get that people like to drive trucks for reasons other than those particular applications.
As you could imagine, the incendiary article got its share of both praise and criticism in the comment sections and social media feeds. Even Western premiers Jason Kenney and Scott Moe got involved in what the Financial Post headlined “Dude, where’s your truck? Western premiers’ defence of pickups sparks cross-country Twitter tempest.” Kenney went as far as changing his Twitter profile picture to show him at the wheel of his Dodge Ram 1500, proudly tweeting “I’m happy to say that ~40% of the vehicles on Alberta roads are pickups. Maybe Toronto columnists should try getting around this province during a prairie blizzard in a Smart Car.”
Culture wars aside, I don’t really think 40-per-cent pickup truck ownership is anything to be proud of, especially when many of those vehicles are driveway trophies. There’s also the ongoing debate over the role pickups play in fatal road accidents. Bigger SUVs and trucks kill more people on the roads by as much as 224 per cent, as reported in the July 27 issue of the National Post (“Canada needs pickup trucks, but they do indeed kill more people”). Unsurprisingly, since the first groundbreaking evidence of the dangers of larger vehicles on the roads, North Americans took up a SUV-pickup arms race to make sure they and their families were not on the receiving end of colliding with a larger vehicle. At least Canadians are less likely to apply that same logic to guns.
As someone who supports policy to cut greenhouse emissions and slow down climate change, I’m aware of my own hypocrisy in owning a truck. But if Canadians are free to buy a truck regardless of how many actual truck things they decide to do with it, I don’t feel the need to restrict my own recreation opportunities in order to offset that behaviour.
The electric trucks are coming, and hopefully in another 10 years the Ford F-150 Lightning will be the highest selling truck in Canada and supplant its gasoline predecessor. I’ll adopt that technology when Canada is ready. But for now, I’ll keep on truckin.’
Vince Shuley is feeling the cost of gasoline this summer. For questions, comments or suggestions for The Outsider email [email protected] or Instagram @whis_vince.
