Truck driver training standards expose fatal flaws

Less than a year after the Humboldt tragedy, pressure on the government resulted in a national set of standards for entry level training for truck drivers. But a W5 investigation reveals it's made little difference when it comes to improving safety standards.

Sounds great, but for the millions of drivers on the road, it’s scary. The highways across this country are full of transport truck drivers with inconsistent training and inexperience and with a shortage of over 20,000 jobs to haul goods from province to province, many carriers are desperate to hire.

In 2018, the Humboldt Broncos bus tragedy cast a dark shadow on Canada’s trucking industry. An inexperienced driver named Jaskirat Sidhu, well educated with a commerce degree, had picked up a trucking job with very limited training. He was looking for a way to earn extra money to support his wife going back to school.

On one of his first solo trips, carrying a massive double load, he ran a stop sign causing a horrific collision resulting in the loss of 16 lives and 13 injuries -- all tied to the Humboldt Broncos Hockey Club. W5’s Avery Haines spoke to Sidhu in his first television interview since being sentenced to eight years in prison.

“Humboldt pushed us as Canadians and as an industry to a place which was so uncomfortable where we went. We need to fix this,” said Kim Richardson, who runs a truck training consultancy and is the president of the Truck Training Schools Association of Ontario.