TORONTO — A quarter of Ontario’s private trucking schools offering mandatory entry-level training for commercial drivers have never been inspected by the provincial government, Auditor General Shelley Spence said Tuesday, raising concerns about oversight and road safety in the sector.Spence released a special audit on Ontario’s large commercial truck driver licensing system, finding that 54 of the province’s 216 registered private career colleges offering mandatory entry-level training had “never been inspected.” She also found that of the 81 schools due for a five-year reinspection, 44 had not been reinspected.“That is true, 25% had never been inspected,” Spence told reporters during a news conference at Queen’s Park. “And then for those that are supposed to be re inspected in a five year period, we found that 44% of those had not been re inspected.”.Asked whether some schools had operated without any government employee ever setting foot inside, Spence replied: “Right, correct.”The audit examined Ontario’s oversight of commercial truck driver training, testing and licensing. Large commercial trucks account for 12% of vehicles involved in fatal collisions in Ontario despite making up only 3% of vehicles on the road, according to the report.The auditor general found inconsistencies in both training and testing standards. Ontario requires Class A commercial drivers to complete 103.5 hours of mandatory entry-level training, but auditors found some schools delivered significantly less instruction.“Based on our students experiences at training providers, we found examples where schools delivered only 59.5 and 81 hours,” Spence said in her prepared remarks.The report also found some students were not taught key driving skills, including “left turns at major intersections, reverse parking and emergency stopping.”Spence said auditors used six students to test training providers and found gaps in two cases.“Two out of six is pretty big ratio, I would say,” she told reporters. “So, you know, that’s a sample, and we sample, I can’t really extrapolate to the whole population, but I will say that it is a problem.”The audit also found that some unregistered private career colleges continued booking road tests despite having previously been investigated and penalized.“What we found is that they had been given suspensions the private career college, and yet those students were still registering under another college’s name to take the tests,” Spence said.Auditors also identified inconsistencies between DriveTest centres. Some locations used lower-speed highways for testing highway driving manoeuvres, while others did not randomly test reversing skills as required.Spence said the province needs stronger oversight and inspections to improve road safety.“Road safety depends not only on the rules, but on consistent training, testing and enforcement,” she said in her prepared remarks.While defending the professionalism of many truck drivers, Spence said the province needs stronger safeguards.“I believe there’s a lot of really great, large truck vehicle drivers out there,” she said. “I just think that we need to make sure, as a government, that we’re training people correctly.”
