The auditor general’s truck driver training report shows some students are only completing 57 per cent of required hours
The undercover report also found that some aren’t learning how to turn left at major intersections or make an emergency stop
A new report published by the province’s auditor general has determined that Ontario is not sufficiently managing training and licensing standards for commercial truck drivers, resulting in dangerous drivers on the roads.
Large commercial trucks make up three per cent of vehicles on Ontario roads, the report said, but accounted for twelve per cent of vehicles involved in fatal collisions between 2019 and 2023. This could be because in Ontario, unlike other provinces, high-risk drivers, including those with suspensions or convictions, are able to obtain large commercial truck-driving licences.
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Auditor General Shelley Spence arranged for investigators to go undercover, pretending to be driving students at six training programs over the course of six months last year. In the report, Spence detailed disturbing findings.
“We found that two private career colleges delivered 59.5 and 81 hours of the required minimum of 103.5 training hours,” the report explained. “Two of our students were not taught key truck driving elements such as left turns at major intersections, reverse parking and emergency stopping.” The undercover students were told to sign off on their hours without having completed them. One student sent by the auditor general said their in-cab training sessions would only last 15 minutes.
The report also noted that some schools modified training records in order to enable students to drive even without the required training. Between 2019 and 2024, the report said, “three registered private career colleges falsified or altered student training records, four did not have records to demonstrate that some or all of their students had completed the required components, and three did not teach all of the required components.”
Spence made 13 recommendations to the province, all of which were accepted. They include monitoring training outcomes and developing an online system to flag when instructors at private colleges lose their own licences or amass excessive demerit points.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
