Expositor production manager Sean Soderman shares his experience as a former Manitoulin Transport driver, praising Doug Smith's rigorous safety culture, speed governors, and industry innovations.
Sean Soderman works at The Expositor as production manager and webmaster. For 20 years, during and following university, Sean worked as a long-distance transport truck driver, the first decade of that time driving for Manitoulin Transport where he came to appreciate the insistence on safety protocols which the late Doug Smith insisted be fundamental to his transportation business and about which Sean chose to write in Mr. Smith鈥檚 memory.
Sean here with The Expositor鈥檚 production team, coming to you from behind the paper curtain in light of Island entrepreneur Doug Smith鈥檚 passing to tell you some of my own positive experience with his preeminent company, Manitoulin Transport.
Before being welcomed into The Expositor outfit a few short years ago, for a decade-and-a-half I was a long-haul trucker variously zig-zagging about Northern Ontario (and sometimes Canada more broadly). The first half of that career began in earnest in my early twenties with Manitoulin Transport out of Sudbury.
A transport truck can be hauling as much as a 140,000-pound payload up and down the steep grades of the Canadian Shield as it tries to maintain highway speed. The extreme torque, the dirt and gravel, the winter cold and the salt put stress on equipment in ways unique to Canada and Northern Ontario in particular. I have happened upon transportation companies which have more of a 鈥渇ix it when it breaks鈥 approach. But my experience with Manitoulin Transport was that of a company which, more than any other, rigorously enforced regular inspections on their equipment.
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