If it were up to Markel Insurance, I would have lost my job. Apparently, I was the worst driver in the MSM fleet. Every time they sent a rookie safety auditor, our general manager got the same rant: “You’ve gotta get rid of this McCarron driver with the 13 demerit points.”

“We can’t. He’s the owner.”

Insurance companies used to be the de facto goalies of our industry. The last line of defense against risky operators.

Bad drivers like me weren’t allowed behind the wheel. Green drivers stayed in the city, cutting their teeth.

When the losses started piling up, your business felt the pain. Premiums went up. You had to raise your prices or drop high-risk work to protect your insurance profile. Customers complained. Phones stopped ringing.

And if you didn’t clean up your act? You lost your insurance. That meant no operating authority and a one-way ticket out of the league, wondering why you ignored safety.

But things changed in the mid-2000s. That’s when the insurance industry shifted from risk prevention to premium generation.

Premium priorities

I’ll admit it, insurance was never my bag. I left it to the safety team and moved on. I thought a “facility” was a building.

But I’m doing a lot of insurance head-scratching lately, wondering how these jalopies, held together by duct tape and barreling down the highway, get insured. The head-scratching turned to disbelief when I recently moderated an insurance panel for PTTAC — the Professional Truck Training Association of Canada. 

I learned that Facility Association insurance is the industry’s last-chance saloon. A non-profit pool that enables every carrier to get insurance. Translation: if your CVOR is brutal or you’re a brand-new entrant with no track record, this is home.

Whether they like it or not, every insurer in Canada is required to participate.

By forcing every insurer to participate, facility insurance spreads inevitable losses across the entire market.

Shared risk sounds fair. It’s not.

Those costs don’t disappear. They come roaring back as higher premiums for everyone, including the safe fleets doing things right. Good operators pay more, while bad operators barely feel it. They crash, file claims, and carry on their merry friggin’ way. As long as they keep paying those premiums, they keep their plates.

Insurers used to be bouncers. Now they’re toll collectors. The notion of subsidizing competitors so they can cut your rates is absurd. Try explaining that to pals in other industries.

That was never the plan. Facility insurance was meant to be a penalty box. A short, sharp wake-up call. Fix your safety, clean up your act, and earn your way back to the real market.

Instead, carriers can sit there for years with zero pressure to improve.

Because even though facility insurance is brutally expensive, it’s still cheaper than fixing the problem. Building real safety systems. Investing in maintenance. Training drivers properly.

When survival only requires a cheque, not change, guess what happens? Nothing.

Facility insurance is an enabler, not an incentive for unsafe operators to improve.

One pool, a dozen rulebooks

Facility insurance is centralized, with risk shared across the country. Losses in one province don’t stay there. They ripple nationwide.

But enforcement? That’s provincial. Different rules. Different pricing. So, what do bad carriers do? They move. Leave Alberta, pop up somewhere softer. New address, same habits. The ghost fleet whack-a-mole game lives on.

Loose provinces become landing zones. Risk doesn’t disappear. It just relocates. In a recent press release, the Ontario Trucking Association nailed what needs to be done to clean this up. This isn’t an insurance problem, it’s a consequence problem.

Let the market do its job.

Otherwise, we’re left with the Toronto Maple Leafs’ approach to risk management: if your conference is too tough, switch to a new one. Because bad operators don’t fix their problems. They just find softer places to play.

You can’t make this crap up.