Ontario inspecting commercial truck driver colleges after scathing audit: minister

TORONTO — All Ontario career colleges that offer commercial truck driver training will have been inspected by the end of next month, the province’s minister of colleges and universities said Wednesday.

Nolan Quinn said the province has already inspected 14 colleges that offer the transport truck driver training and is set to look at the rest in the next six weeks.

The action comes after a scathing audit of the transport trucking industry revealed a slew of problems.

In a report released Tuesday, Ontario’s auditor general concluded the province was not effectively monitoring commercial truck driver training, inspection and licensing regimes.

Shelley Spence and her office came across career colleges that have cut corners on training hours and skills and found there was little oversight from two provincial ministries, leaving many unqualified transport truck drivers on the road.

She found that Quinn’s ministry never inspected 25 per cent of the career colleges that offer commercial truck driver training. There are more than 200 registered private career colleges in Ontario that offer the training.

Spence also found that six unregistered private career colleges that were previously investigated by the province were still booking tests and handing out driver training certificates despite not being allowed to do so.

The minister said the issue of trucker training has been on his radar, and he expects the superintendent of career colleges to inspect every institution on an annual basis.

“We’re going to continue going after the bad actors,” Quinn said. “Since we have taken office we have closed 19 career colleges, 11 of those are trucking colleges.”

The auditor sent several people undercover as driving students at six training providers over six months last year. They found two private career colleges delivered significantly fewer training hours than required, raising concerns about the rest of the system, she said.

Two institutions did not teach drivers how to turn left at major intersections, how to reverse park and emergency stop, the report said.

They also found colleges that were falsifying student training records and some that did not keep student training records at all.

The auditor filed 13 recommendations to the province, which has accepted all of them.

It’s about time the province took action, said New Democrat Leader Marit Stiles.

“We have been raising this issue for years, this has been in the media for years, so I think it’s a bit rich to hear the government now say we’re going to audit this,” she said.

The New Democrats, which dominate northern Ontario ridings, have long pushed for increased safety on the province’s northern roads.

Three New Democrats recently embarked on a 10-day journey driving from Toronto to the Manitoba border and back to highlight the dangers of the roads. They spoke to numerous families who lost loved ones on the roads, mostly at the hands of commercial truck drivers.

“They have no excuse for not having taken action sooner and, honestly, I wish it wasn’t so late, because people have actually lost their lives,” Stiles said.

The Ford government is to blame for the province’s unsafe roads, said interim Liberal Leader John Fraser.

“When you have drivers that can’t back up or make a left-hand turn and they’re driving transport trucks, that’s dangerous,” he said.

Commercial truck drivers account for a disproportionate number of fatalities on Ontario’s roads and the problem is especially acute in northern Ontario.

Drivers and passengers are far more likely to die in a crash in northern Ontario, according to data crunched by the Northern Policy Institute, which shows the 2021 fatality rate for the region was 9.25 per 100,000 people. That was more than double the crash fatality rate of 3.94 per 100,000 people across all of Ontario that same year.

The institute and the Going the Extra Mile for Safety organization have long advocated for change to highway designs. They’d like to see either divided highways or the 2-plus-1 design, a three-lane highway with a passing middle lane that alternates direction every few kilometres.

The province launched a 2-plus-1 highway design in North Bay in 2022 and is twinning a stretch of Highway 17 near Thunder Bay.

But Highway 17, part of the Trans-Canada Highway system, stretches some 2,000 kilometres from North Bay to the Manitoba boundary. It is also one of the main interprovincial trade routes that sees thousands of transport trucks daily, many of which are involved in collisions.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 13, 2026.

Liam Casey, The Canadian Press