Where’s the Bad Guy?

There is talk that federal Transport Minister David Collenette plans to introduce amendments to Canada’s Motor Vehicle Transport Act before the end of the year in an effort to exert more control over how each province tracks a trucking company’s accident history and compliance with safety rules. The proposed reforms would, in essence, make National Safety Code Standard 14–guidelines for rating a carrier’s safety performance–an enforceable federal regulation. It would require each province to develop and maintain a carrier profile system that is in harmony with the others. The provinces would issue a federal safety fitness certificate and safety rating to carriers on Ottawa’s behalf, and entitle bearers to unfettered access throughout Canada so long as they maintain a satisfactory, satisfactory-unaudited, or conditional rating.

If a province fails to live up to the requirements of Standard 14, Ottawa could nullify its ability to issue safety certificates to extra-provincial carriers. Without a safety certificate, a trucking company would be legally restricted from operating outside its home province.
But at a meeting in Halifax last May, a committee of transport regulators responsible for Standard 14 indicated there would be no MVTA reforms until the provinces can show that carriers with equivalent safety records will receive the equivalent safety ratings no matter where they’re based in Canada.

They’ve been working on the problem for more than seven years. In fact, legislation to reform the MVTA has been introduced (and fizzled) twice before.

There are major inconsistencies among the provinces on what information should be recorded and factored into a safety rating, and at what point authorities should step in and warn a carrier that its performance is slipping. There are disparities in the resources available to efficiently capture and analyze information.

The provinces can’t even agree on what is a heavy truck. Alberta and Saskatchewan will not lower their gross weight threshold to 4,500 kilograms, in line with the rest of Canada. Roger Clarke, executive director of vehicle safety and carrier services with Alberta Transportation, says such a move would mean an influx of some 32,000 extra carriers on which to maintain a profile, and the province doesn’t have the resources to handle it.

“This (lack of uniformity) is a safety issue, and potentially a very big one,” says Brian Orrbine, a senior policy analyst with Transport Canada, and one of the key players in the development of Standard 14. “Safety ratings and the carrier safety certificate are based on base-plating. I’m concerned that carriers could migrate to places where information about them either isn’t accessible to outside agencies, or where they know their home jurisdiction doesn’t accept information about their performance from outside agencies. We could lose the integrity of the safety rating management.”

It’s already happening, says Dave Marson, a lease operator with the general commodities division of Economy Carriers in Edmonton.

“We’re operating at a time when people can go to the state or province du jour and plate their truck,” says Marson, who also serves as president of the Owner-Operators Business Association of Canada. “And why not? Many jurisdictions are just not user-friendly. They run you through the ringer when it comes to paperwork. A good businessman will go off and base-plate someplace that’s easier to deal with, or that’s cheaper to deal with. An unsafe carrier, a guy who wants to operate in the shadows, he’s looking for a place where he can hide. Is that fair to the guy who invests in safety and plays by the rules? No. It’s a disadvantage.”

Three years ago, Transport Canada received a scathing report on the inability of the provinces to deliver consistent results. The difference across the jurisdictions in the number of “events”–those convictions, inspections, and collisions that may lead to a change in a carrier’s safety rating–varied by a factor of 10 or more between the most stringent rating process and the most lenient.

The news wasn’t much better for the timing of interventions. When three years’ worth of infractions from a hypothetical trucking company were run through nine different provincial safety-rating systems, three jurisdictions downgraded a “satisfactory-unaudited” carrier to a “conditional” rating within five months of starting the business. Four jurisdictions dropped the carrier to conditional within two years of operation. In Alberta, the safety rating wasn’t reduced to conditional until the end of the third year.

Not only do jurisdictions have different policies for that point on the threshold when “something” happens, their policies differ on how to intervene (warning letters, interviews, audits, hearings, etc.) and how a carrier’s rating should be affected by each of these interventions.

“There’s no consistency here,” the report’s author, Fred Nix, concluded wryly.

Now, once again, transport agencies in Canada are processing hypothetical cases through their safety rating systems. The tests, co-ordinated by the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators, examine how the various systems track and capture information about infractions so jurisdictions can see how to trigger interventions in a manner that is consistent across Canada.

Until those results are known, Orrbine and provincial transport regulators like Alberta National Safety Code and operating authority manager Wayne Lilley cite ideal percentages when describing when they step in and take action.

“Everyone has agreed,” says Orrbine, “to 40 per cent (of the overall threshold spread)” as the point when a carrier should receive a warning letter.

How close to 40 per cent are the provinces now? Look at British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. Keeping in mind that all three rate carriers according to fleet size, their intervention levels indeed are within spitting range of 40 per cent. But they vary significantly from one another. Ontario generates a warning letter when a carrier reaches 35 per cent of its overall threshold spread. In Alberta, it’s 43.8 per cent, and in B.C. about 32 per cent. If the aim is make sure provinces intervene at roughly the same point, and if raw percentages are any indication, then regulators have their work cut out for them.

Standard 14 also requires provinces to retrieve, integrate, and exchange results from CVSA (Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance) inspections, carrier and driver accident information, and convictions. While most agree that pointing accidents on carrier profiles is important, Alberta says it’s not ready to do so. Nova Scotia may never implement a points system for crashes, it says, if the current government fails to regain power in the next provincial election.

There is some uniformity in how provinces deal with carriers whose performance is slipping. B.C., Alberta, and Ontario issue a warning letter as the first intervention, the second intervention invariably involves a meeting with the carrier, and an actual audit is normally reserved for the third intervention, followed by a show-cause hearing if the carrier continues its errant ways.

However, none of this is cast in stone. In B.C., “warning letters are automatic, interviews are automatic,” says compliance manager Rob Kroeker. Wayne Lilley, however, stresses that in Alberta, “nothing happens automatically.”

Differences with other parts of the country are sometimes real, sometimes only apparent.

Paul Arsenault, director of driver and vehicle safety at Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations, proclaims that carriers there are called in immediately for an “audit” at that point when other jurisdictions merely issue a warning letter, but he qualifies that assertion by describing it as “an educational audit.”

These differences in how the provinces manage carrier profiles and rate carriers have created an atmosphere where some jurisdictions are less receptive to outside information than others. Each week, motor carrier agencies across the country dutifully place conviction, crash, and inspection information incurred by out-of-province carriers onto the CCMTA’s electronic carrier information exchange network. The company’s home jurisdiction is then able to download that information into the carrier’s profile to get a more comprehensive picture of its safety performance.

Not so in Ontario and Quebec, where there’s more concern about what carriers do inside their borders than outside. Thus, Ontario will create a carrier profile for a Manitoba base-plated carrier operating in Ontario, but spurn information about one of its own carriers operating in Manitoba.

But if Ontario is not incorporating information on their carriers operating in Manitoba to that carrier’s profile, and Manitoba isn’t doing it because that’s not its role under Standard 14, then who is? Short answer: no one.

That’s a problem, says Orrbine. It also raises the prospect of “bad” carriers base-plated in Ontario running all their trucks in one or more other provinces to avoid a downgrade in their safety rating.

Flip the scenario around, says Graham Cooper, vice-president of the Canadian Trucking Alliance, the Ottawa-based industry lobby group. If an Alberta carrier with 100 trucks operates three trucks in Ontario, the province will treat him as though he’s a small carrier, and he’ll have his safety rating based on an artificial fleet size, Cooper says.

His accident exposure could put that carrier theoretically out of business in Ontario, where in fact his performance in Ontario is not at all reflective of his performance overall.

Managers of Ontario’s Commercial Vehicle Operator’s Registration (CVOR) program acknowledge the dangers of excluding information from other jurisdictions, but seem divided about how to address them. “Even if a carrier is base-plated here in Ontario and they’re operating in Saskatchewan,” says Ontario motor carrier compliance manager Peter Hurst, “I would hope that Saskatchewan is doing the on-road performance and doing the facility audits.”

“If Manitoba has a problem with one of our carriers,” adds Ontario’s program standards manager Mike McKay, then Manitoba “can pick up the phone and we would put them on our facility audit list.”

Some would argue this places the onus for capturing and acting on information upon the wrong party.

Efforts to harmonize safety-rating systems across Canada will go for naught, say regulators and industry groups, if the appropriate resources are not available to underpin those systems. In Nova Scotia, for example, the province has yet to implement the NSC application process and has no system in place for pointing accidents, for example. Paul Arsenault worries it may never get such a system if governments can’t find the bucks. “I’m not sure when the election’s coming, but that could have an impact on what we’re allowed to do.”

Otherwise, Arsenault feels pretty lucky. His department may only have three auditors, but with a mere 240 carriers to audit (five per cent of roughly 4,800 province-wide), his staff “makes out just fine.”

In B.C., the worry is less about the number of auditors (13 auditors to investigate the worst of 23,000 active carriers), but the time needed to answer carriers’ questions about the NSC.

The chances of getting audited in Alberta, which has six auditors, are “slim to next to none regardless of the points you accumulate,” says Dave Marson, who adds that a lack of auditors has an economic impact. The “bad guys, the undesirables,” he says, don’t make the investments needed to operate safely. “That makes it difficult for us to operate, to demand a decent wage, and to keep the equipment up and running,” Marson says.

The CTA’s views haven’t changed much since Fred Nix’s report from the summer of 2000. The group feels the provincial and federal governments do not possess the political will to see these changes through.

If the provinces are not prepared to give their transport departments the resources to manage these kinds of programs properly, Cooper says he doesn’t care how much they tweak the computers to synch up the rating systems.

“All we want to know is if you take Carrier A and you run him through the B.C. profile system and take that same carrier through the Newfoundland profile system he comes out at the end of the day with the same rating,” he explains. “It doesn’t matter necessarily what the underlying details are, but they have not been able to cross that threshold at this point.” That’s all Brian Orrbine and his provincial and territorial counterpoints want as well. Whether they cross that threshold remains to be seen.