Big Rig Fatalities on Canadian Roads

"[There has been lax oversight of driver licensing and certification schools]." 

"We found that some students at registered private career colleges obtained [Entry Level Training] certificates without completing all mandatory training hours and elements."

Ontario Auditor General report 

Canadian Trucking Alliance

"Although TFWs [temporary foreign workers] in trucking represent a small percentage of all permits issued under the TFW program, a quick review of online data shows that truck driver is often the 5th or 6th most requested job classification."

"TFW approvals for truck drivers] more than quadrupled [between 2010 and 2024]."

Teamsters Canada report

 

"While there are many commercial vehicle operators who are doing their due diligence and prioritizing safety, unfortunately we are still seeing those who are not properly maintaining their vehicles -- including repeat offenders."

RCMP spokesman

(Source: Government of Canada data)

 

Evidently there is a severe shortage of long-haul truckers in Canada. The result may be that governments are turning a blind eye to inadequately trained drivers. In many instances young men from the Indian subcontinent who travelled to Canada on student visas to attend Canadian universities are likely to be among those classified as temporary foreign workers who are hired by trucking companies that are not too terribly wedded to Canadian trucking requirements to fill the gap in low numbers of truck drivers' availability. These are young men whose presence in the country was for a specific purpose -- higher education -- who have just not bothered to show up for classes. They are also people whose visas have run out with the expectation that they will leave the country.

 

The rash of serious trucking accidents that have been occurring when large transport trailers are being driven irresponsibly can be at least partially attributed to the illegal presence of foreign temporary workers. What is equally troubling is that those who have been involved in, who have caused lethal road accidents, are being handled with undue consideration despite their having been responsible for lost lives as a result of careless handling of big rigs on busy highways. A non-citizen trucker who caused a fiery crash north of Kamloops B.C., killing two people has been handed a $2,000 fine and 18 months of probation, as an example.

 

Lovepreet Singh drove  his truck at full speed into a Toyota Corolla that had reduced speed at a construction zone. Singh's lack of attention caused the death of two people trapped in the burning car. Sukhwinder Sidhu, an Ontario trucker, responsible for a similar collision when he plowed his rig into cars stopped at a construction site that killed a woman was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. A judge in Thunder Bay, Ontario granted Indian trucker Ajitpal Singh an absolute discharge. Singh had caused a fatal head-on collision with another trucker; that lighter sentence helped Singh avoid deportation to India. 

 

Jaskirat Singh Sidhu whose failure to stop at a stop sign at an intersection caused the death of 15 members of the Humboldt Broncos (Saskatchewan) hockey team in 2018, and last month had his deportation deferred. Mr. Sidhu who had served three-and-a-half years of the eight-year sentence ordered for causing the crash can now take advantage of a 17-month pause in deportation to enable him to seek a permanent stay on "humanitarian and compassionate" grounds. He had expressed  his profound sorrow on behalf of those young men who died so needlessly.

 

Photo: Eassons Transport

 

A judge in British Columbia gave 90 days of house arrest to trucker Dalvir Singh Jhatta for a crash that police stated could have killed several people, when he drove his tractor trailer at full speed into a tow truck attaching a Mercedes impounded by the RCMP. "Luckily the tow truck operator, the police officer, and the Mercedes driver were safely off to the side of the road, or they would certainly have been killed" stated Cpl. Michael McLaughlin of the BC Highway Patrol. 

 

In an April 2024 crash, Harpreet Singh pleaded guilty to driving without due care and attention when his tractor trailer crossed the centre line and collided with a CN Rail work truck, causing both vehicles to explode into flames, killing Singh's passenger Dharminder Singh and CN Rail employee Juver Balmores. Criminal charges were not pursued, as Crown prosecutors agreed to a $2,000 fine and 18 months' probation. 

 

While large commercial trucks represented three percent of the vehicles on Ontario roads, 12 percent of all fatal crashes between 2019 and 2023 were caused by these trucks, according to a report produced by an Ontario Auditor General report studying lax oversight of driver licensing and certification schools. A report published last month by Teamsters Canada found disproportionately heavy use of temporary foreign workers in the trucking sector. TFW approvals for truck drivers between 2010 and 2024 "more than quadrupled", the Teamsters report found.

 

The Burnaby RCMP spearheaded an inspection drive on commercial trucks last year throughout the Lower Mainland, discovering that over half of those trucks failed to meet basic safety standards. Police announced that of 2,901 trucks inspected, 1,610 were "placed out of service" for failing to meet provincial safety standards. Statistics Canada found that as a result of a collision involving a commercial motor vehicle, there were 377 fatalities for 2023, the most recent year for data availability. 

TruckNews.com 

 

Batten Down the Escape Hatches!

"There's a fear that this kind of restriction will enlarge into a wider community, considering the geopolitical tensions nowadays around the world, so the fear is definitely there."

"If the U.S. is really a champion of academic freedom, what you should do is not restrict this kind of communications between different countries of the world."

Jacky Li, 3rd-yr environmental studies major, University of California, Berkley

"We aren't bringing in anyone from Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Yemen or Libya or anywhere else that threatens our security."

"[We will] revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities [in response to campus protests]."

President-elect Donald Trump ... October 2023 election campaign

Cornell University has issued a travel advisory to international students.  LightRocket via Getty Images

Uncertainty over the status of foreign students studying at U.S. universities and colleges with the accession of Donald J. Trump back to the White House appears to have caused a frisson of excited responses, where a growing list of American academic institutes are now advising their international students to make haste in returning to campus before the president-elect is inaugurated, to ensure that they can, after all, return to their studies in the United States. 

In anticipation of travel bans being once again instituted, over a dozen schools have now issued travel advisories. For anyone facing uncertainty over whether they may be able to remain in the United States who depends on an academic visas, the advice is to return to campus from abroad before January 20. 

In January 2017 then-President Trump had issued an executive order banning travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan Libya, Somalia and Yemen; just incidentally countries where the U.S. was or had been at war with, and whose nationals often turn out to be problematic in observing American laws, their faith in Islam leading them to socially incongruent methods of 'expression'.

Either barred from flight or detained at U.S. airports after landing, travellers who included both students and faculty, tourists, businessmen, and visitors, faced unpleasant interdiction. Some of those countries were removed in time while others were added; some 15 in total and over 40,000 individuals had been refused visas resulting from the ban. A ban rescinded when President Biden took office in 2021.

US. colleges and  universities enrolled over 1.1 million international students during the 2023-24 school year; students from India and China accounting for over half of all international students in the U.S. While roughly 43,800 had arrived from the 15 countries that had been affected by Mr. Trump's original travel restrictions. The question hovers as to what the Trump transition team knows is to come, although Mr. Trump himself has iterated his intention to revive the travel ban and expand it with new "ideological screening" for non-U.S. citizens.

He made it clear that his intention is to bar "dangerous lunatics, haters, bigots and maniacs". The list of institutions advising international students to return before inauguration day and to prepare for potential delays at immigration control, includes Harvard and Brown, Boston schools like Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others around the country, from Johns Hopkins University to the University of Southern California.

Cornell University informed its students that a travel ban involving the 13 countries President Trump previously targeted "is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration", and it is likely that other nations could be placed on the list; in particular China and India.

 

Gun Crimes, Car Thefts, Smuggling, Violence Increase in Canada

"Rival gangs control parts of the tow-truck industry here, using the heavy-duty vehicles to transport drugs, extort car-crash victims with high fees and fake automobile accidents to defraud insurance."

"They once resolved their territorial differences with their fists, but now a wave of gun smuggling from the U.S. has turned their fights into a lethal blood sport."

Reporter Vipal Monga, Wall Street Journal

"Experts say organized smugglers are taking advantage of lax Canadian screening."

"U.S. Customs and border Protection records an 'encounter' in its database when it comes across someone who is inadmissible to the U.S., or when border patrol officers find someone who has illegally crossed the border into the U.S. between border posts."

CBC

Handguns are pictured near recovered stolen cars during a Toronto Police Service press conference in Toronto, Ontario on Wednesday, March 27, 2024. Police say the surge in auto thefts has led to rises in home invasions, violent robberies and gun violence throughout the Greater Toronto Area. (Greg Bruce/CBC)

 

Canada is fast gaining a reputation, under the Trudeau-led Liberal government, of being an unreliable partner to the United States on immigration, crime and border security. Migrants crossing illegally into Canada from the United States by their tens of thousands a few years ago, bypassing legitimate border stations where they knew they would be turned back to the U.S. transited for the purpose of entering Canada have hugely diminished in prevalence.

The preferred mode of entry by far now has become through flights into Canada where disembarking passengers declare on arrival that they are seeking haven, and Canada immigration and border agents simply rubber-stamp a refugee hearing date for them, since they are unequipped and incapable of any background checks to determine whether claimants have any legitimacy and above all, have no criminal records from their countries of origin which would make them inadmissible to Canada.

The mayor of Brampton, Ontario, Patrick Brown, spoke of the irresponsible immigration practices and policies attributable to the Liberal government, in an interview. His comments were directed to the flood of student visas that have allowed ostensible students from abroad to enter Canada for study and to take advantage of the lax entry requirements, with plans to become permanent residents. In the last few years such student visa entrants numbered a half-million annually.

With the presence of so many, a concomitant explosion of car thefts has been bedevilling Canada's residents and police forces in its largest cities. A growing number of gangs operate in the Toronto region where young men are paid to steal cars and drive them to rail terminals, there to be transported by shipping container to the Port of Montreal. Arrived in Montreal, the vehicles are off-loaded by organized crime groups at the port, loaded onto ships and exported globally.

Over $1 billion in value of purloined cars was represented by these thefts in the Province of Ontario alone. The preventive expedient of having government policing agencies inspecting such shipments would catch the problem in its end-game making it unprofitable for the gangs that control this crime of growing proportions, and thus serve to frustrate their purpose, persuading them there is no profit to be had and the runaway thefts would substantially subside.

Ottawa's dismal failure to prevent gun smuggling from the United States to Canada is yet another outstanding problem of long duration. The situation has been responsible for a dramatic increase in shootings and crime among tow-truck gangs that operate in Toronto where it is being recognized that the profits from car thefts sent overseas fund the gun-smuggling racket. 

Compared to 2023, shootings in Toronto have risen 50 percent, and homicides have increased up to 20 percent, caused in part by "the tow-truck violence", according to Inspector Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police Service guns-and-gangs unit. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow faced the need to increase the police budget while investing in preventive programs in hopes of sidelining youth from joining gangs. "No doubt about it we are seeing way too many guns from the States coming across the border", she agreed.

It is clear that once again Canada's governing Trudeau Liberals have failed the test of good governance in this index as in so many others. It has not escaped the notice of both American presidential candidates that the U.S. border with Canada is becoming a vexing problem by a government that appears to have no real interest in finding ways to protect Canadians from the growing scourge of criminal violence.

Ontario Provincial Police and the Canada Border Services Agency said they've seized 598 stolen cars that were destined for export at the Port of Montreal, during a news conference on April 3. The vehicles had an estimated value of $35.5 million dollars. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)