AG exposes holes in Ontario's commercial trucking safety rules
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Commercial truck drivers with a medical marijuana licence are allowed to operate their vehicles with the drug in their system in Ontario as long as they’re not legally impaired, the auditor general’s annual report says.
The United States has no such exemption, nor does Transport Canada for flight crews and controllers, nor Metrolinx for its train and bus operators, Bonnie Lysyk reports.
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Ontario also has no mandatory drug and alcohol testing for commercial truck drivers, auditors say.
Commercial truck traffic has increased by 10% over the past decade in Ontario and large buses and trucks were involved in 182,000 collisions, the report says.
“Ontario maintained higher fatality and injury rates than Canada as a whole and the United States in the majority of years between 2008 and 2017 when evaluating only commercial vehicles,” the report says.
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The use of an important road safety tool — commercial vehicle inspections — fell by 22% between 2014-18 in part because they could not fill enforcement officer vacancies, the report says.
And in one of the more scarier findings, given recent high-profile accidents involving large vehicles, auditors noted flaws in commercial driver licensing and training.
Ontario is the only province that allows private carriers to test their own drivers for commercial licences, and they have a pass rate of 95% compared to 69% at DriveTest centres, the report says.
Companies that passed drivers that later went on to have higher-than-normal rates of accidents were allowed to keep testing.
Some private Motor Vehicle Inspection Stations that issue certificates that commercial vehicles are road worthy have been found involved in fraudulent activity like issuing certificates without actually inspecting the vehicle, the report says.
“An MVIS garage employed only one mechanic and was sent 4,000 inspection certificates in 2018 alone which is 76 times the average per mechanic,” the report found.
When brought to the Ministry of Transportation’s attention, it turned out that the mechanic had ordered 2,000 certificates — still well above the per-mechanic average — and was sent an extra 2,000 for free without ministry staff noticing, the report says.
Lysyk said that had the ministry maintained its previous level of inspections, auditors calculate that as many as 10,000 unsafe commercial vehicles and drivers would have been removed from Ontario roads.
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