Eight years have passed since Jaskirat Singh Sidhu ran through a stop sign near Armley, Sask., before colliding with the Humboldt Broncos tour bus on its way to a hockey game.

The field adjacent to the intersection, once strewn with bales of peat moss, the wreckage of a bus split into three pieces, twisted remnants of a tractor-trailer, and the passengers’ personal belongings is now a memorial; a poignant reminder of lives taken or irrevocably changed on that April afternoon.

One of those souls was 18-year-old Evan Thomas. His father, Scott, took part in a discussion last week during the National Recruiting and Retention Symposium in Burlington, Ont. I applaud him for speaking from his heart to a roomful of trucking insiders. That was brave.

A personal account

“Evan would have been 26 now,” he began. “His friends are all getting married. They got their big-boy jobs. We’ve got four weddings to attend this summer. He was a good kid, you know. A phenomenal student. His brain was his best asset. And he happened to be a good athlete.”

Evan was a rookie on the Humboldt Broncos hockey team. Traditionally, the rookies ride at the front of the bus, Thomas told the audience.

“Evan was near the front. He was standing, putting his suit on, when the accident happened. He had no chance. He was standing adjusting his tie when [Sidhu] blew through the stop sign,” Thomas recalled.

Still, Thomas has managed to forgive Sidhu for what happened to his son. “Clearly, he didn’t intend for that to happen. He was just a guy in a bad spot,” Thomas said of Sidhu.

The two met and talked following the marathon victim impact statement portion of the proceedings against Sidhu in early 2019. Thomas was alerted that Sidhu wanted to speak with him, so they met in private for 15 or 20 minutes.

“It was me and him, his cousin and his uncle. [When we met] he fell down on his knees and grabbed my hands and started crying into my hands. I picked him up and hugged him. My shirt was wet with his tears, and I just said, ‘What happened?’

“Forgiveness was the easiest path forward for me. To hang on to anger and hatred takes a lot of energy,” he said. “It would be different if his intention was to cause harm. That would be a much more difficult conversation. But that wasn’t his intention.”

Thomas characterized Sidhu as “just a guy in a bad spot.” He said he believed Sidhu had been taken advantage of by his employer and was probably under pressure to get the job done.

“He was stressed and lost, and I felt bad for the guy, so I wanted to talk to him,” he said. “He was a broken man.”

Thomas’ words rekindled my feelings about this tragedy. I wrote about this shortly after Sidhu pleaded guilty to all the charges against him. Like Thomas, I also felt Sidhu was a guy in a bad spot.

But there’s more.

The record shows Sidhu had taken about a week of training before some licensing examiner in Alberta signed off on his competency. We have little to go on in determining how good or bad a driver he was, except for the anecdotal evidence of his inability to reverse a B-train and the litany of errors inspectors found after the fact in his logbook and vehicle inspection reports.

As I noted at the time, and still believe, running a stop sign is a grievous error, but it’s not synonymous with inadequate training. If not for the cosmically bad timing of having a hockey bus and tractor-trailer in the same place at the same time, we’d probably never have heard of Jaskirat Singh Sidhu.

But that incident sure brought the driver training issue into sharper focus.

MELT to the rescue?

Following the incident, industry and government leveraged the crash to gain wider implementation of mandatory entry-level training (MELT) programs, which Ontario had implemented 10 months earlier. The crash dramatically accelerated national adoption, with most other provinces following Ontario’s lead, albeit with local flavor.

While MELT has its detractors, several driving school operators I respect, including Don MacDonald, chairman of the Professional Truck Training Alliance of Canada (PTTAC), and Andy Roberts of Castlegar, B.C.’s Mountain Transport Institute, insist MELT works well when it’s done properly. But often it’s not.

We’ve all seen the scams and fraud perpetrated by shady driving schools. Those poorly trained, barely competent drivers are still out there, and many of those shady schools are still in business. 

MELT was supposed to fix this. It hasn’t. The question is, why not?

Lessons forgotten or ignored?

To answer this question, we have to stop looking at Humboldt as a one-off tragedy. What if, instead, we see it as a proxy for many of the major issues plaguing our industry – issues no government seems to have the will to deal with?

For instance, every day – MELT or no MELT – truck drivers emerge from driving schools no better equipped to handle the daily challenges than Sidhu was.

Every day, provincial driving examiners certify candidates as competent, even while knowing those candidates are simply delivering rehearsed, scripted answers.

Those inadequately trained and barely competent drivers then often wind up working for fly-by-night carriers. There they are mercilessly exploited, underpaid and put into situations they are ill-equipped to handle.

Shady insurance brokers sell insurance with out-of-province registrations to bottom-feeder carriers who would never be insured by legitimate brokers. 

Carriers who should have been shut down and locked up merely change their names and relocate to another jurisdiction when enforcement turns up the heat. Some even keep collections of magnetic signs in their jockey boxes, like so many bottles of windshield washer, each bearing the name of one bogus company or another.

We have companies selling annual inspection stickers to fleets whose equipment belongs in a scrap yard. And we have legitimate safety-focused carriers going out of business because they can’t compete with these rate-cutting bottom-feeders.

None of this is secret. We all know it’s happening.

A deeper truth

Thomas continued his story. Sidhu, he reminded us, appeared in court Jan. 8, 2019, and took full responsibility for his actions, sparing his victims’ families the agony of a trial.

He stood and addressed the courtroom, saying, “It happened because of my lack of experience.” 

Asked if he believed Sidhu was qualified to be driving that truck (a flatdeck B-train) that day, Thomas was emphatic: “Not at all.

“He did the bare minimum to get his ticket. He had been employed by that company for two weeks when his employer [Sukhmander Singh, owner of Adesh Deol Trucking] sent him on his first trip outside the city of Calgary. In conversations I had after the crash, I learned the people, where he loaded the peat moss, had to back his truck up. He didn’t know how to do it. He was lost, in over his head, and he had no idea what he was doing.”

And so it is with many newly minted CDL holders. Learning the basics in a MELT program is just the start.

When I started driving almost 40 years ago, I often found myself in well over my head. Just like Sidhu.

I’ll never forget the terror I felt pulling A-train tankers through winter storms in Northern Ontario – even with two years of experience behind me. Fortunately for me, more experienced drivers coached and cajoled me into getting the job done without hurting anyone.

Today, it seems, we prefer shooting YouTube video of their follies rather than stepping in to help.

Learning how to be a professional driver is scary as hell, and it’s much worse when you don’t have a supportive company behind you. Sidhu faced all those challenges on his own – and soon became the poster boy for everything wrong with driver training.

They don’t know what they don’t know

It’s pure supposition on our part, but based on personal experience, PTTAC’s MacDonald and I agreed Sidhu was likely pretty rattled following his loading experience and having to re-tarp the load at the side of the road not long after leaving the plant.

His lawyer said during a court appearance that Sidhu had become focused on a billowing tarp as he was approaching the intersection where he’d eventually meet the bus taking the Humbolt Broncos to their hockey game.

If Sidhu’s self-admitted lack of experience played a pivotal role in the crash itself, it was not in failing to appreciate the meaning of the stop sign. More likely, he was consumed with doubt about the job he had done with the tarps, and second-guessing what he might have done differently.

MacDonald and I discussed this too, and we both concluded it’s entirely possible he was mentally preoccupied, maybe replaying those early events in his head as he rolled inexorably along. Each of us had done exactly that more times than we cared to remember

“Employers need to realize that the people coming out of MELT don’t have it all, not even close,” Thomas observed near the end of the session. “There’s a huge responsibility, I think, on the employer’s part to make sure their employees are adequately trained. Our public roads are probably the biggest workspace in Canada. They are the same roads my daughter drives on, and my son’s hockey bus drove on.”

Sidhu’s employer walked away from this with a $5,000 fine. The company was issued an unsatisfactory rating on Nov. 8, 2018. That’s the final entry on the company’s public profile with Alberta Transportation.

There’s no record of anyone with the same name having started a new trucking company in Alberta. But because of the antiquated and fragmented way we deal with trucking regulatory issues in Canada, it’s nearly impossible to tell if they might be back in business elsewhere.

Those who needed to hear message were missing 

Thomas certainly had the attention of everyone in the room. But he was preaching to the choir. Those attending the discussion were companies and people concerned with and working to improve safety.

The people who really need to hear his message – the politicians, the regulators, and the miscreant driving schools, insurance companies and carriers – were AWOL.

“I think most people are good employers trying to do good things, but there’s some out there that aren’t,” Thomas acknowledged. “There’s lots of evidence about the whole Driver Inc. thing and all those other Adesh Deols that are just running people through the mill. I don’t know that we’re any better off than we were eight years ago. Just last winter in Saskatoon we had four overpasses hit by semis driving with loads they didn’t know what was on the back of the truck. To me, that’s partly the driver’s responsibility, but somebody in that company had to know [the height of what they were hauling] and where they were going. How does that happen?”

While hockey sticks still adorn porches all across the country this time of year, governments just sidestep some of our more pressing problems Humboldt helped bring to light: the insurance and immigration scammers, the chameleons, the rate cutters, the willfully ignorant examiners, Driver Inc. and the mechanisms that enable all this mayhem.  

The good guys are trying, but the industry cannot rid itself of this cancer. The rules have got to change.