Canadian Trucking Alliance threatens to pull its support for safety ratings

TORONTO — While provincial transport officials meet in Ottawa today to ponder specifics of a national agreement on motor carrier safety ratings, trucking industry leaders are ready to pull their support for such a plan.

Canadian Trucking Alliance chief executive David Bradley said he fears that “the same inconsistency, the same lack of precision, the same lack of science and objectivity that plague the National Safety Code” are evident in government blueprints for a safety ratings system.

“We’ve been working with governments for five years on this,” Bradley said at the annual Alberta Trucking Association convention in Calgary last Friday. “We’re at a stage where if we don’t see movement very, very soon, then I’m obliged to tell governments, ‘Look, don’t do anything. Just leave us alone.'”

Provincial officials on the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators compliance and regulatory affairs committee have been working for nearly five years to establish standards for fleet compliance reviews and safety ratings. National Safety Code standard 14 is meant to be a framework for such review.

Bradley said the industry deserves a system that clearly identifies who is safe, targets enforcement resources toward unsafe operators, and provides incentives for satisfactory carriers. “This was all promised to us,” he explained. “At this point, I’m not optimistic that on some very basic issues that consistency will be reached, and that in the end, what will be proposed will do nothing more than create more costs for responsible carriers and allow the minority of carriers that are problems to fall through the cracks.”

Instead, Bradley noted, “It appears that some of the provinces will fast-track something now so they can stand up to the public and say, ‘Look what we’ve done, we have a national safety rating system.'”

Some provincial trucking association leaders who sit on the CTA Board of Directors expressed concern that such a hard-line stance would jeopardize the generally positive working relationships they’ve developed with their provincial governments.

“We want to talk to our own governments and express a sense of urgency and frustration on this in our own way,” said Collin Heath, general manager of the Alberta Trucking Association. “We have a good relationship with our government. So do Manitoba and Saskatchewan. There’s no need to be aggressive about this now. This issue is too important and we’ve worked too hard to toss it away.”

Bradley responded, “This is a unified CTA position, and in no way should have a negative impact at the provincial level. It’s important to recognize that distinction. We need to work on both a provincial and a national level to reach a fair and equitable solution on safety ratings.”