It’s just so ironic, I can’t resist commenting. So many of the people decrying the mainstream media, and indeed some of the trucking trade press, for spreading fake news have fallen victim to exactly that.

Parts of the industry were thrown into a tizzy last week when “stories” began appearing on social media and on some sketchy websites proclaiming big changes were coming to Canada’s trucking regs early this summer. The proclaimed changes included a universal federal speed limiter mandate, changes to trucking’s hours-of-service rules, and changes to driver licensing requirements, among others.

Out of the blue, our federal government was going to foist all these changes on us, without consultation, without any regulatory impact analysis, somehow without any of the impacted stakeholders knowing anything about it in advance?

Or wait…maybe that was part of the plan. Keep this all quiet until the day they throw the switch. Maybe it was part of some Trumpian agenda to further destabilize Canada? He likes to pull these schemes out of his hat at the last minute.

Maybe nobody remembers the years of consultation that went into the 2007 revisions to hours-of-service. I nearly paid off my mortgage writing about that rule change. Ten hours off versus eight. No more split sleeper. Thirty-six- vs 34-hour resets. All big changes, but even minor changes to the rules would affect carrier operations, and extensive consultation would have been carried out.

According to the document that made the social media rounds, Canadian drivers were to be subject to more stringent HOS rules to minimize fatigue-related incidents. Drivers would have to take 15-minute breaks after every three hours of continuous driving with a 30-minute break required after eight cumulative hours of driving.

That paragraph looks like it came from Australia’s HOS rules. But I digress.

Another such post I saw said changes were coming to Canada’s entry-level driver training regime. The problem was, the author used the American acronym for that rule (ELDT), not MELT, as we call it here. Oops.

Outdated links

On the speed limiter front, I came across a post that linked to an archive of Transport Canada docs outlining the risks and benefits of requiring trucks to be governed to 105 km/h. But, ahem, those docs were all dated 2007.

They were the docs published by the regulator ahead of the speed limiter roll-out in Ontario and Quebec — and wisely eschewed by other jurisdictions in Canada — back in June 2008.

So much for adding a little legitimacy to to the hoax.

Also, I reached out to a friend with close connections to trucking HQ at Transport Canada. That person assured me nothing in the online story was even close to true.

I’m a journalist and so have a vested interest in keeping up with the goings on in this industry. Could I have missed all these earth-shattering developments? I didn’t think so. But my first step in solving such a mystery is to trace back the origin of the piece.

You can try this yourself. I often do it to discover if anyone is plagiarizing my work.

Verify author’s credibility

Copy a short sentence from some online text, like a trucknews.com story, and paste it into the search window of your browser. Include quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence, like so:

“Since electric trucks do not have an unlimited supply of energy onboard, everything possible is done to make them as energy efficient as possible.”

You should get a return showing that sentence is part of a story I wrote recently for trucknews.com on regenerative braking.

I did the same thing with a couple of sentences from the piece that got so many drivers lathered up. Guess what: only two returns. One was for an as-yet unpopulated website.

The other linked back to a Facebook post. I won’t mention names here in case he or she was the victim of a hack, but I did message this person asking where the information came from. Still haven’t had a reply.

These days you can write almost anything you want in a social media post — or on a website for that matter. Mostly with impunity if you do so from behind a clever avatar or some other digital disguise. But real journalists, like me and my colleagues at trucknews.com, are accountable for what we say. We won’t get away with making stuff up, and we’re publicly answerable for what we write.

Had no one wondered why we hadn’t covered stories of this magnitude?

I can also share that during my research into the origin of this bit of digital fluff, I came across a group of websites purportedly carrying information of interest to this industry, and a couple of others. While seemingly unrelated, they were all formatted exactly the same way, with identical headers, archive listings, and page appearance.

And from the website, scamadvisor.com, all had website ownership and control information redacted. Try that with trucknews.com. All that info is there. 

And the writers, several of whom were present on several of the websites, clearly do not exist. They are AI manifestations. I searched for their names with a subject modifier, for example, Bob Smith + truck. As expected, there were no returns. Try that with “Jim Park + Truck” or “James Menzies + Truck” and see what you get.

As it turned out, one of the name searches returned a junior worker at Transport Canada, but this individual worked in the navigable waterways department. It was probably a coincidence, but it was a lead I had to pursue.

Do your homework

And now for the bad news, friends. All this online chicanery demands a bit of effort and critical thinking on the part of the reader. Unless you’re dealing with a trusted source, you should be suspect of anything that seems out of the ordinary or beyond the realm of the likely.

There are people with vested interests in fooling you, trying to encourage you to think or react in certain ways. And on many issues, we do not have the knowledge or expertise to know conclusively which is the correct answer. Here, we have to rely on sources we can trust and that have track records of honesty and clarity.

I’m a bit of a news junkie. I scrape my way through three or four newspapers every day, reading opinions and reporting from several sides of the argument.

Spoiler alert here: Yes, newspapers have biases. What might be a principal angle in one paper’s coverage might not even appear in another’s. It’s up to the reader to draw his or her own conclusion based on their understanding of the issue and their level of trust with the reporting. The worst thing you can do is read only one account. You’re not getting the whole story.

All that to say, when some oddball story shows up on social media with some extreme position on issues we — as truck drivers in this case — ought to be familiar with, it demands some second thought and evaluation.

Sorry to make you work a bit here, but do a little research: how likely is this to be true? Has any coverage appeared anywhere else? If so, are those sources trustworthy? Do they know and understand the industry they are covering?

I would never call trucknews.com unimpeachable, but we get it right far more often than not. We’re accountable, and we don’t hide behind digital deceptions.

Next time you come across some sketchy bit of reporting, reach out to us. We can probably set you straight. And if we don’t have an answer the day you call, we’ll find it.