I was getting an education from the other side of the trucking industry, seeing Ministry of Transportation (MTO) officers do their job at the newly constructed Putnam, ON. inspection station. They turned on the lights while I was there, explaining that they have to be careful to bring in only so many trucks at one time otherwise they’ll cause a back-up, or worse, an accident.

It’s like fishing with a net: flick on the light and whatever trucks happen to be coming down the highway pull into the inspection station. Then turn off the lights and inspect your catch to see if you nabbed a “big one.”

At one point, I asked if they had quotas. “We have performance expectations,” said one of the officers. The visit was more of a day-in-the-life-of-an-MTO-officer than a lets-have-a-serious-discussion-about-quotas, so I left it that.

Then, wouldn’t you know, two weeks later Today’s Trucking receives internal MTO documents detailing those “performance expectations,” A.K.A. quotas. If you’ve been reading this magazine, you know the rest. 

But let’s forget the word “quotas” for a second.

The term “performance expectations” implies that it is an internal model for ensuring accountability, a way to, as MTO spokesperson Bob Nichols told me, “ensure consistency and integrity within the Enforcement Program.”

On the surface, that’s fine; every employee in every industry, whether in the private or public sector, needs to be held accountable for their job performance.

But often companies will implement an accountability program that makes you want to give your head a shake. Or tell the person who thought of it to give their head a shake.

Given the nature of the job, MTO’s 20 percent out-of-service “performance expectations” for their frontline officers is a completely illogical model of accountability that places pressure on officers, causing them to make questionable OOS calls.

Turn the lights on, casting your net. Turn the lights off, reeling in your catch. Your boss said he expects 20 percent of your catch to be pike. No pike in this net, so try again. And again.

But maybe there just aren’t that many pike swimming through this area. 

A more acute comparison: the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). It is widely accepted that they have “performance expectations,” too: get X many speeders this month. In this instance, a quota system as an employee accountability tool makes more sense; people tend to speed frequently and there are particular areas where speeding is common. It’s more akin to hunting than MTO’s fishing. 

In the internal MTO email, the author writes “do what you can to meet those numbers,” but there is no logical way that a hard performance expectation number can work as an accountability tool when the inspection officers are simply throwing a net out.

So what happens when MTO officers aren’t making their expected OOS catch? My guess is they put a driver “out of service for 72 hours because one of his fuel receipts had a different name for the town where he’d filled his tanks than the one he’d put in his log book,” Rolf Lockwood wrote over here, citing one of many — and I mean many — examples from Today’s Trucking readers that are clearly not a road safety issue, let alone a reason for being put out-of-service. But it certainly counts towards that 20 percent OOS number that officers were advised to “do what you can to meet…” 

Is this a case of when the bureaucrats get too much control over the day-to-day operations? I think so, and I also think there is a lesson to be learned here.

A few months ago I interviewed Dean and Darrell Kohut, former owners of Hi-Way 9, based out of Drumheller, AB., about selling to Mullen Group. At one point during the interview, Darrell said that they don’t like to add unnecessary layers to their business. It just gets complicated and you end up having more problems, he explained.

Basically, be careful what programs and technology you bring into your operation. Much of the stuff out there — the advice from this “expert” or that “guru”, implementing new technology, monitoring your staff, the “best practices” — well, it just might not work for your operation, causing you to waste time and money. And unlike the MTO, you don’t have a bank account that replenishes itself with taxpayer dollars.