Restoring Safety and Accountability in Ontario’s Trucking Industry

The Ontario trucking industry has always been led by businesses that have adopted fundamental principles that guide the most critical sector of the supply chain.

But there’s no denying the deterioration of highway safety in Ontario any longer. Once considered the safest jurisdiction in North America, Ontario is now shamefully a major hub for a growing number of unsafe trucks, untrained drivers, and an underground economy fueled by unscrupulous trucking companies who disregard safety, tax, labour, and environmental rules; and who are brazenly aware that governments are turning a blind eye to their non-compliance.

Responsible transportation industry leaders like the Ontario Trucking Association have been warning about this decline for close to a decade. Ontarians have noticed and share our concerns by demanding government help us stop the lawlessness and restore law and order to the trucking industry.

Demand Action Now.

Use this form to send a letter directly to your MPP.

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As a constituent and concerned citizen, I am sending this letter to express my sincere concern and frustration with the state of the trucking industry and the deterioration of highway safety in Ontario.

It’s undeniable that the standard of truck safety, licensing, the quality of the companies – and the drivers they employ – has fallen steeply over the last several years. I am aware that actions have been taken recently, but they are not enough to clean up the bad behaviour in the trucking industry.

I understand many of these safety concerns are symptoms of systemic lawlessness in the trucking industry, stemming from a sophisticated underground economy and a network of bad actors who do not have the interests of the public safety in mind.

Well, not only does this scheme exploit and abuse workers and rob taxpayers of billions needed to fund social programs, but it’s also now putting me and my family at risk. Every day, Ontarians can see the (sometimes fatal) consequences of inaction and lack of enforcement on our roadways and in our communities. Enough is enough! We want a real, honest effort to put an end to this lawlessness and a commitment from our elected officials to keep our families safe.

From what I understand, no new laws or regulations need to be passed. You just need to enforce the rules that exist to keep us safe. Over 90% of the trucking companies’ places of business have never been inspected by safety officials, and the inspection stations on highways are often closed. Why are we not inspecting trucking companies regularly like the restaurant industry? Why are these highway inspection stations not open 24/7, protecting my family from unsafe trucks? And why are we not making sure truck drivers are properly trained and licensed to keep highways safe?

I hope you consider this correspondence and choose to stand up for the hard-working men and women in the trucking industry who are doing their job lawfully on behalf of Ontarians like me, who rely on the trucking industry every day.

I would appreciate a response to this email explaining how you and your party plan to address the problem and enforce the laws and regulations meant to keep Ontarians safe.

Sincerely,

(Your name)

Learn More

Who We Are

The Ontario Truck Safety Coalition (OTSC) is led by the Ontario Trucking Association. Our goal is to compel the governments of Ontario and Canada to make our roads safe again by putting an end to the underground economy and rampant non-compliance in the trucking industry.

Collectively, our truck drivers and industry workers are the safest operators on the road, using the safest, most compliant equipment. But we also realize that these critical values and standards are rapidly decaying in our sector.

Addressing these harsh realities requires a coordinated effort from responsible industry, safety organizations, and community groups. But we need all Ontarians who care about protecting road users to voice their support for strengthening enforcement, improving oversight, and investing in better education and training to support a culture of accountability.

The Crisis

Social media has shined a bright light on the deteriorating safety standards within aspects of the trucking industry and poor carriers who are putting the travelling public at risk. It’s important to understand, however, that individual incidents of bad behaviour shared on social media are symptoms of a much larger, systemic underground economy and culture of non-compliance in the trucking industry.

While it’s easy to blame individual, unskilled drivers, the overall lawlessness in the trucking industry is driven mainly by company owners and other bad actors who operate under a misclassification scheme that exploits loopholes in the tax and immigration systems to evade taxes and abuse workers and deny basic labour standards, while robbing billions from our economy, and undermining fair competition.

This lost revenue, funnelled into the underground economy, has a devastating ripple effect. It means less funding for vital public services, including healthcare, education systems, and critical infrastructure.

Consequently, companies that operate under this illicit model will typically disregard most other rules and standards, leading to untrained and unqualified drivers and dangerous habits being witnessed regularly on Ontario highways and throughout our communities. In some cases, trucking is just a ‘front’ for organized corruption linked to illegal truck yards and storage of stolen goods, drug and weapons smuggling, and human trafficking, among other nefarious activities.

We have been sounding the alarm for nearly a decade, demanding action to combat this gross non-compliance and increasing safety risk in the trucking sector. But our calls for justice have been largely ignored. Governments at Queens Park and Ottawa are acutely aware of the scope of this endemic problem, which is putting the public at risk and threatening the very existence of responsible, compliant carriers. While various departments and agencies have done some good work to address this issue, the overall efforts are far from adequate to end the crisis. Unfortunately, political headwinds seem to hold back any meaningful action.

Fixing this problem is easy. No new regulations need to be written. All that needs to happen is that the current laws need to be enforced, and meaningful oversight must increase! All that’s missing is the political will to do so!

We have been sounding the alarm for nearly a decade, demanding action to combat this gross non-compliance in the trucking sector. But our calls for justice have been largely ignored. Governments at Queens Park and Ottawa are acutely aware of the scope of this endemic problem, putting the public at risk and threatening the very existence of responsible, compliant carriers. While various departments and agencies have done some good work to address this issue, the efforts are far from adequate to end the crisis. We believe labour misclassification, tax evasion and the erosion of overall safety is allowed to run rampant in the trucking industry for political reasons.

Fixing this problem is easy. No new regulations need to be written. All that needs to happen is the current laws need to be enforced, and meaningful oversight must increase! All that’s missing is the political will to do so!

How to Help:

Now that you understand how sophisticated and systemic the problem is, join us in calling for change and demanding an end to the safety crisis and lawlessness on our roadways.

Your letter will, among other things, support our efforts to promote solutions, like:

24/7 enforcement scale operations across Ontario, with regular presence of federal and provincial enforcement agencies with oversight over misclassification, WSIB abuse, tax fraud, human trafficking, and drug smuggling;
Eliminate the satisfactory/unaudited, which creates a massive hiding place for unsafe carriers engaged in illegal activity. All carriers must undergo an audit on a regular basis;
Ensuring labour and tax rules are prioritized and strongly enforced;

Improve commercial truck training and licensing, and increase oversight of those who disregard the standards;
Address challenges with the issuance of Safety Fitness Certificates for commercial trucking;
Oversight of temporary placement agencies;
Crackdown on abuse and exploitation of foreign students, temporary foreign workers, and permanent residents in the trucking industry;
Consider improvements to the commercial insurance regime in Ontario.

TAKE ACTION NOW AND SHOW YOUR SUPPORT FOR CHANGE

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