Inside the audit that pushed Ontario to overhaul truck training

Ontario's plan to standardize truck driver training won cautious support this week from both sides of the industry it will regulate: the schools that deliver the training and the carriers that hire its graduates. The province announced on September 21 that it will develop a single standardized curriculum for new commercial drivers, a direct response to a special report from Ontario's Auditor General Shelley Spence in May that found some private training colleges cutting hours and certifying students who had never learned basic manoeuvres. The roughly 103 hours of training already required under Ontario's mandatory entry-level training requirements introduced in 2017 has not changed. What has changed is the government's admission that the paper and the practice have not matched up.

Schools say enforcement, not curriculum, is the real gap

Spence's special report, titled Large Commercial Truck Driver Licensing, found that two of six career colleges tested undercover delivered only 59.5 and 81 hours of the required 103.5, and that students at some schools were never taught left turns at major intersections, reverse parking or emergency stopping. Six unregistered colleges were still booking road tests and issuing certificates despite having no authority to do so. The report also found the ministry responsible for licensing schools has no routine process for sharing inspection findings with the Ministry of Transportation, the body that enforces the rules on the road.

Ken Adams, chairman of the board of the Truck Training Schools Association of Ontario (TTSAO), said the findings track with what compliant schools have been watching happen for years. TTSAO represents roughly 50 schools that Adams said already exceed the province's minimum standards, and he said the association has lost three member schools this year to underpriced competitors.

"There is no possible way that if you're doing things the right way, you can run a business like that and run a training school and train people properly," Adams said. He pointed to a school in Ottawa, where he also owns a training business, that recently advertised a long weekend special to get a Class A licence for $5,500, when the lease on a single truck alone runs about $3,000 a month.

Adams traced the oversight gap to inspection capacity rather than the rules themselves. The number of licensed schools grew from roughly 98 in 2019 to as many as 283 by 2022, he said, far outpacing the ministry's ability to visit them, particularly through the pandemic. "What I think we really need is specialized investigators knowing what they need to be looking for, and more than just paper," Adams said, arguing that generalist inspectors who cover hairdressing salons and flight schools in the same week cannot meaningfully assess a commercial driving program. Ontario is not alone in confronting this problem: other provinces are cracking down on unsafe trucking schools and carriers, with Alberta shutting five fraudulent trucking schools since April 2025.

Carriers back the plan, and push to widen it

Tej Dulat, director of public affairs and stakeholder engagement for the Canada Truck Operators Association (CTOA), said the industry had been expecting a standardization push for some time. He described both the drivers who trained at substandard schools and the carriers who later hired them as caught in the same failure. "They both were the victim of this thing," Dulat said, noting that carriers rely on government-issued credentials with no independent way to verify what a licence actually represents.

Dulat was measured on two of the four subject areas the province flagged for the new curriculum. On human trafficking awareness, he said CTOA's focus stays on trained, trusted drivers and road safety rather than that specific addition. He was warmer toward fatigue management, though he argued the bigger constraint is infrastructure: a shortage of safe rest stops along Highways 11 and 17 in northern Ontario, where CTOA has been raising the issue directly with government.

CTOA wants the curriculum's scope to extend beyond commercial licensing entirely. Dulat said the association has told the province in consultations that general G1 and G2 licensing should include dedicated chapters on sharing the road with heavy vehicles, pointing to European models, since many close calls on the highway start with a passenger vehicle cutting in front of a truck that cannot stop quickly. He also flagged driver mental health and stress as a gap the current debate has largely missed, an area where a national standard for psychological health and safety already exists but has been slow to reach trucking specifically. CTOA has begun surveying its members on the subject and, according to Dulat, found many drivers surprised the topic was being raised at all. "This is something which is very important in this profession," he said, and suggested the curriculum eventually point new drivers toward where to find help.

Both leaders supported the province's proposed six-month wait between earning a Class G licence and attempting a Class A road test, a measure they said would matter most for drivers trained outside Canada who need time to adjust to local roads and winter driving conditions before entering a commercial cab.

What accountability looks like by 2027

The province has said it will consult industry leaders and training providers over the coming months, targeting curriculum implementation in early 2027. CTOA said it has already taken part in two consultation groups. Adams pointed to the ministry's existing practice of sending undercover testers into schools to confirm air brake instruction is delivered and tested properly, calling it a meaningful accountability tool worth expanding. Dulat proposed going further: requiring instructors to wear body cameras as a technology-based check that hours claimed on paper match hours actually taught.

Neither leader described the September 21 announcement as a finished product. Adams said he raised that directly with the minister at the announcement itself. "This didn't happen overnight," he said he told the minister. "We're not going to fix this overnight." For now, both a training-school chairman and a carrier-association director are asking for the same thing: a system that can prove, not just promise, that Ontario's next generation of drivers actually receives the training their licences say they did.