Fixing the future

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This article was published 22/04/2023 (1121 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Don Sobering, whose father started Sobering Auto Electric in 1948, remembers when auto repair mechanics were called grease monkeys.

Sobering, 85 and his wife Joyce, have been the driving force behind the Motor Vehicle industry of Manitoba scholarship fund for many years.

While that may have once been seen purely as a kind-hearted charitable undertaking, talent recruitment is now as crucial — if not more so — for the auto and collision repair industry as any other industry.

As such, the scholarship fund and the industry’s efforts to recruit young people to the business has taken on a much more important role.

“We used to be the lowest on the food chain,” said Sobering, 85.

“Soon, auto repair techs are going to be treated the same as doctors and lawyers.”

Regardless of the accuracy of the comparison, the point is that the auto repair industry remains a vital player and its ability to recruit talent and/or trainees is of supreme importance to its future.

It is one of the reasons that after many years of existing with a very low profile the Automotive Trades Association of Manitoba is in the midst of a revival of sorts.

An exclamation point will be put on those efforts tonight when the association holds its first President’s Ball since 2008 and announce the first nine inductees into a newly created Hall of Fame.

After battling it out with MPI a couple of years ago, in what was seen as an existential fight to save the industry, the association won out after refusing a low-ball offer from MPI and eventually getting an acceptable deal.

Many of the players said it brought the industry together and there was a collective acknowledgement that more professionalized leadership was required.

Denis Cloutier was hired as the association’s first paid staffer for many years. A $200,000 marketing digital campaign is about to be launched aimed at encouraging high school and college students to enter the industry.

“We are trying to become more relevant,” Cloutier said. “We want to make the general public more aware of who we are. We want to become the voice of the collision repair industry. We are the experts.”

It’s not as if it only just occurred to the industry that it should organize. The association has been around since the 1930s and continued on for many years as a volunteer-run group.

But after the bare-knuckle negotiations with MPI in 2021 many realized that it needed to have a greater presence and make an effort to become politically engaged.

The association’s current president, Norm Bruneau, the owner/operator of St. Claude Autobody, south of Portage la Prairie, said, “I think like any organization that is volunteer-driven, sometimes things can lose steam after a while. So as the years went on we lost a little momentum.”

He said with the success of the work the association did re-establishing good working relationship with MPI, there was a realization that the industry needed to do a better job communicating with its members.

And the success also attracted new members. The association now represents about 175 of the 230 collision repair centres in Manitoba that are accredited by MPI.

The last decade or so has also brought a significant amount of technological change and lots of pressures to invest and constantly engage in skills upgrade. The upcoming mass production of electric vehicles will mean another round of upheaval for the repair industry.

“We have to do a lot more than a lot of other industries as far as training goes,” said Johnny Vernaus, the owner of Vernaus Auto Body and a former president of the ATAM and the initiator of the Hall of Fame.

“We had quite a run-in with MPI. They were trying to break us and it consumed a lot of money over the last five years,” he said. “But things have never been better with MPI.”

While the membership is dominated by independently-owned operations it does have the clout of auto dealerships whose service departments are association members as well as some large consolidators like Winnipeg-based Body Group.

Ryan Kehl, the Manitoba regional operations manager at Boyd Autobody & Glass said the industry came out of a few tough years that had the potential to divide it — MPI had attempted to get individual shops to accept the offer rejected by the association.

“It was one of those pivotal points where we were able to get what we were looking for and instead of pulling us apart it brought us closer together,’ said Kehl. “With that we have gained some momentum and we have been able to keep it going.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca