The federal government says it’s cracking down on abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. I spent some time over the holidays looking at government provided compliance data, and found the data tells a different story.

Ottawa continues to approve large numbers of foreign truck drivers for a relatively small group of employers, while reactive enforcement catches problems only after the fact. In fact, little seems to have changed since I wrote about this problem in June.

In trucking, the question isn’t whether the system catches bad actors. It does. The question is why it keeps approving them first.

Federal Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) data from the second quarter of 2025 shows more than 300 trucking companies were approved to hire foreign truck drivers in just three months. A small subset of those companies received approval to bring in 20 or more drivers at a time.

None of the biggest LMIA users from that quarter currently appear on Ottawa’s non-compliance list. That’s the good news.

But it’s worth remembering, the trucking companies that do appear on the non-compliance list weren’t caught immediately. Many were approved months or years earlier. Only later did inspectors uncover unpaid wages, missing records, inspection avoidance, unpaid penalties and, in some cases, employers that were not actively engaged in the trucking business at all.

The system doesn’t stop bad actors at the door. It lets them in, then checks their credentials after the damage has already been done.

Most truck driver LMIAs are approved under the high-wage stream — a category meant to reflect lower-risk employers with the capacity to pay what they promise, keep records and cooperate with inspections.

Yet when enforcement finally arrives, trucking violations are rarely related to minor paperwork errors. Inspectors frequently cite employers for wage mismatches, missing payroll records, refusal to provide documents or complete disengagement from the inspection process.

Those are not technical slip-ups. They are egregious failures.

If an employer can’t show what it paid drivers, can’t prove the job matched the LMIA or won’t answer inspectors’ questions, it’s fair to ask whether the approval process is testing the right things in the first place.

In analyzing LMIA data, I discovered a relatively small group of employers account for a disproportionate share of approved driver positions. As such, when a company approved for 25 drivers later fails to comply, the impact isn’t isolated. It ripples across dozens of workers and amplifies the consequences.

Yet the approval process does not appear to scale scrutiny based on the size of the request. A company approved for two drivers faces much the same front-end review as one approved for 20.

The data proves that inspectors are doing their jobs. The penalties are real (though often not collected). The bans can be long. Some trucking employers are barred from hiring foreign workers well into the 2030s.

But enforcement that comes only after violations surface is not prevention. It’s cleanup.

By the time penalties are issued, workers have already been hired, wages may already have been underpaid, and the industry’s reputation has already taken another hit.

The vast majority of trucking companies play by the rules. Yet the entire sector pays the price when enforcement consistently trails approval. The data reveals a structural flaw in how we approve foreign workers.

Ottawa is good at approving labor demand. It is far less effective at screening for employers that can sustain compliant operations over time. The result is a persistent lag between approval and accountability.

If Ottawa is serious about fixing abuse in trucking, scrutiny has to move upstream — before approvals are issued, not after inspectors arrive, and match is lit to the paper the monetary penalty was written on.

Because in trucking, the question isn’t whether the system catches bad actors. It’s why it keeps approving them in the first place.