Tejpreet Dulat
Every day, Canadians share the highway with tractor-trailers moving food, medicine and essential goods across the country. They deserve to know that the trucks beside them are operated by properly trained drivers working for carriers that follow the law. On that point, there should be no debate.
Recent reporting has highlighted real and serious problems. Ontario’s Auditor General sent undercover students to truck driver training schools and found that some delivered substantially fewer hours than the required minimum. Police have laid criminal charges in an alleged scheme involving commercial driving examinations. Some drivers who are employees in substance have been wrongly classified as contractors to avoid employer obligations.
The Canada Truck Operators Association wants these practices stopped. A licence obtained through fraud, a skipped training hour or deliberate worker misclassification harms drivers, endangers the public and undercuts every honest carrier competing for the same freight.
But the conversation is taking a troubling turn. Canadians are increasingly being asked to see two trucking industries: one responsible and one reckless.
It is a tidy narrative. It is not an accurate description of how this industry operates.
Canada’s trucking industry already operates within an extensive framework of safety and compliance requirements: National Safety Code standards implemented by provinces and territories, carrier registration and safety-rating systems, commercial licensing requirements, hours of service rules, roadside inspections and scale house enforcement.
While specific obligations vary by jurisdiction and type of operation, no carrier should receive preferential treatment, or automatic suspicion, because of its fleet size, age or the background of the person who founded it.
The meaningful distinction is not between large and small, or old and new. It is between compliant and non-compliant. Unlike a slogan, compliance can be measured carrier by carrier through inspection results, safety ratings, audits, collision records and verified enforcement findings.
What has changed is who can participate in the industry.
Trucking has evolved alongside the wider economy. E-commerce reshaped how Canadians shop and what they expect from delivery. Telematics, electronic logging devices and digital freight platforms now give smaller fleets access to tracking, compliance and freight management tools that were once available mainly to the largest companies.
These developments lowered barriers to legitimate entrepreneurship. Thousands of Canadians have taken the opportunity to buy trucks, build fleets, create jobs and compete in a market historically dominated by larger, established businesses.
That growth should not be mistaken for evidence of an industry falling apart. It reflects how technology, entrepreneurship and competition are changing its structure.
Federal data show how central smaller businesses have become. In 2025, 99.5 per cent of employer establishments in truck transportation had fewer than 100 employees. These are real businesses with real obligations, and like every carrier, they should be judged on their records.
Treating the newer or smaller part of the industry as inherently suspect does not make roads safer. It risks creating barriers to legitimate competition and pulling attention away from the evidence.
It can also misdirect enforcement. If policy is built around assumptions about a category of carrier, regulators risk focusing on business profiles rather than proven violations. Poor operators and excellent operators exist at every fleet size.
CTOA’s approach is straightforward: one industry, one rulebook, with every carrier judged by its actual record.
That means:
- Enforcing existing safety, labour, licensing and immigration requirements, with penalties serious enough that they cannot simply be treated as a cost of doing business.
- Holding training schools, licensing examiners and carriers accountable for the standards they are responsible for delivering.
- Making carrier safety and compliance records more accessible and comparable, so shippers, brokers and the public can make decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions.
- Including small and mid-sized fleets, owner operators, drivers and worker support organizations in federal discussions developing trucking compliance, LMIA and trusted employer policies.
Small and mid-sized fleets have every reason to want fraudulent schools, unsafe operators, exploitative employers and deliberate rule breakers removed from the industry. They compete against them every day. Their owners and drivers should be part of the solution, not treated as the problem before their record is examined.
The trucker who guides a stranded motorist through a snowstorm still exists. Sometimes that driver works for a national fleet. Increasingly, that driver may own the truck or work for a smaller company.
Our responsibility is to ensure that every one of them meets the required standard, and receives the same fair opportunity to succeed.
Tejpreet Dulat is Director of Government and Public Affairs at the Canada Truck Operators Association, a national not-for-profit representing small and mid-sized trucking fleets, owner operators, dispatchers and drivers.