Itinérance et drogues | Un CPE quitte le Quartier chinois
· La Presse
If it feels like the roads and highways of Ontario aren’t as safe as they used to be, that’s because they aren’t. Two unrelated announcements from government agencies have proven that.
The first being an announcement of charges for bribery to obtain G-class licences and the second being an audit of commercial truck driving schools showing large gaps in the system.
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How many times have you been driving down a highway in recent years, especially around large trucks – semi-trailers – and thinking that the driver doesn’t seem to know what they are doing?
A new audit of Ontario’s entry level training colleges for truck driving will leave you cold. It seems, according to the audit, that many students aren’t taught the basics of driving.
The audit of entry level training (ELT) schools found that between 2019 and 2024 “three registered private career colleges had falsified or altered student training records, four did not have records to demonstrate that some or all of their students had completed the required ELT components and three did not teach all of the required components.”
‘Key truck-driving elements’ not taught
The audit used undercover students to assess driving schools regulated by the province. In two cases, students were given just 59 1/2 and 81 hours of training instead of the required 103 1/2 hours.
“Two of our students were not taught key truck-driving elements such as left turns at major intersections, reverse parking and emergency stopping,” the report said.
Measures like these, the hours required and the skills required to pass, are in place to ensure drivers know that they are doing on the road. Not following protocols can have real life consequences.
“Without an effective process in place to enforce compliance with all mandatory training, these drivers continue to operate,” Auditor General Shelley Spence wrote in her report.
“This poses a safety risk for all drivers on Ontario’s roads.”
Commercial trucks account for just 3% of all vehicles on the road, but also account for 12% of all vehicles involved in fatal collisions, the report found.
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Ministries not sharing info: Audit
The audit also found problems between competing ministries. While the Ministry of Colleges and Universities was in charge of inspecting the schools training drivers, they didn’t routinely share inspection reports with the Ministry of Transportation, which could enact enforcement measures against schools.
Some schools weren’t providing full training; others were using unqualified instructors. The bottom line is that some people transporting goods in large containers on our highway system were being given qualifications that they should not have received, putting us all at risk.
One major factor the audit uncovered was the wait time between getting your Class-G licence – your general driver’s licence – and your Class-A or truck-diving licence.
“Drivers who waited between one and two years were 6% less likely to be involved in first-year at-fault collisions and drivers who waited between two and three years were 41% less likely to be involved in first-year at-fault collisions, compared to those who upgraded within a year,” the report said.
Licence fraud on the rise?
Earlier this year, several people were charged with fraud related to commercial truck-driving operations. Now we have several more being charged in relation to obtaining Class-G licences, which the audit showed can lead to bad outcomes for truck-driving licences.
Before the pandemic, Ontario had fewer than 100 schools training truck drivers. Truck drivers were deemed an essential service and we couldn’t get enough of them, but now there are more than 200 schools and not all of them are playing by the rules.
Ontario clearly has a problem and Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria needs to get a handle on it.
“We have zero tolerance for any of those bad actors,” Sarkaria said in response to the audit.
He also pointed to legislation passed last year that requires a mandatory six-month window between obtaining a Class-G and Class-A licence as well as stepped-up inspections of schools.
Whether any of this will be enough remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Ontario has an unknown number of drivers on the road who probably shouldn’t be there, all thanks to holes in the system.