On the eve of The Globe & Mail’s scathing investigation into the erosion of trucking safety oversight, a preventable disaster unfolded in Manitoba. A 49-year-old woman was killed. The truck that ran the stop sign at highway speeds and struck her was operated by a carrier stripped of its safety certificate by the province of Manitoba for continuous violations, only to secure plates from Alberta, and roll right back onto the highway.
This was no random oversight. It was the predictable output of a dangerous business model in Canadian trucking. And if we do nothing, more Canadians will die.
There are at least hundreds of rogue companies employing thousands of drivers operating as “chameleon carriers” who simply change their name and jurisdiction when they get into trouble.
Sadly, it’s a reality that the Canadian Trucking Alliance and the Ontario Trucking Association have been sounding the alarm on for years, desperately calling on federal and provincial governments to fix the same vulnerabilities exposed in the Globe and Mail’s recent investigation.
But litigating the past won’t save lives in the future. Now, we hope this public attention brought on by a national mainstream outlet and a dedicated reporter will amplify a decade of work by CTA and the associations to finally propel our governments to act with absolute urgency.
We learned this week, from federal, provincial, and territorial officials, that our asks have not gone unactioned and that in the background, an aggressive set of tools has been built to deal with these issues head-on by those in government who know exactly what needs to be done.
Lives at stake
They just need to be operationalized. Now, if there are any remaining bureaucratic challenges, they must be eliminated and political considerations dismissed to not cause any further delay. Too many lives are at stake.
Provincial labour and transport ministers have agreed to develop a plan by this fall to end the “slave wage” abuses, wage theft, rampant misclassification in the form of Driver Inc, and toothless fines that plague our sector’s underground economy.
We also know that labor abuse and highway safety are fundamentally linked. When 85% of commercial fleets in this country are never inspected on-site at their facilities, bad actors thrive.
Consider the absurdity: I have a member of the Ontario Trucking Association (OTA) who’s run a reputable, compliant trucking business in Ontario for 30 years and has never once been visited at their facility by provincial transportation regulators. Defenders of the status quo will argue this is proof of an efficient system, that we only need to focus on the problem fleets. That is a dangerous flaw in logic. The reality is that everyone needs a check-in occasionally to keep the system honest.
If regulators never establish a baseline presence with everyone, they have no real way of knowing who is actually safe and who is simply flying under the radar. Yet, across Canada, restaurants are visited by provincial regulators at least once a year (regardless of their records, and multiple times if issues are flagged).
Why are we more vigilant about inspecting restaurants than companies that operate 80,000-pound commercial vehicles sharing our public highways? Why not trucking?
Stop rewarding the bad actors
One of the first steps all levels of government should take is to stop funding this underground trucking economy through their procurement. Governments need to lead by example and only offer their business to fleets who are following the rules. Similarly, provincial governments must audit their own massive freight transportation contracts to ensure public dollars never fund tax-evading or wage-robbing operators.
The path forward requires bold action. The federal government has championed truck safety through commitments in Budget 2025 and subsequent testimony at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities (TRAN).
Now is the time to move forward and install a concrete, national solution. We need the federal government to fully embrace and spearhead the creation of a mandatory national database that forces provinces and territories to talk to each other in real-time, effectively eliminating the “chameleon carrier” loophole once and for all.
The foundational pieces to make this a reality are ready — provincial and territorial officials have done the work and its comprehensive, it just needs to be operationalized and supported federally. At the same time, we also need federal labor enforcement to end the “business-as-usual” fines that rogue operators treat as a mere operating cost.
In Ontario, to reset the course for trucking, OTA has asked the government to act on: the 24/7 operation of commercial vehicle inspection facilities, ending of the satisfactory unaudited safety rating category and the introduction of an endorsement-based commercial licensing and training regime.
Now more than ever, we need labor and transport ministers across Canada to act quickly with maximum regulatory force. The time for study is over; the time for enforcement is now.
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