CALGARY, (April 18, 2005) — In response to a high-profile licence mill scandal that rocked the province in February, Alberta Transportation Minister Lyle Oberg has proposed a 37-week pilot program that would train and certify truck drivers as professionals.

The Canadian Press reports that the professional certification plan — the first in any Canadian jurisdiction — would be developed with the trucking industry by this fall and could be run through Red Deer College in central Alberta. Oberg will be pushing for cabinet approval of the proposal within a month, CP reports.

The course that will likely be adopted is the Canadian Trucking Human Resources Council’s Earning Your Wheels program. It would be taught by driving schools that meet the criteria set out by the council and the province and monitored by Red Deer College. Up to 100 students would take part in the pilot program, but it’s expected that within five years that could be ramped up to about 600 a year.

“The whole component of taking (nearly) a year of training will increase the safety almost exponentially,” Oberg was quoted as saying.

Alberta, like most Canadian jurisdictions, currently requires only that truck drivers pass a test to receive a Class 1 license.

The government and the trucking industry have been looking for ways to firm up the driver training industry in Alberta after police shut down the Delta Driving School on suspicion that untrained truck drivers were being put behind the wheel for fees of up to $2,500. Some of those drivers were later involved in serious collisions, police said.

Police, tipped by provincial investigators, allege Class-1 licences were doled out to several hundred unqualified drivers, many of them from B.C. Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC) subsequently retested over 100 truck drivers that received a licence from the Delta school — and every one failed the retest.

In the two-year sting, dubbed Operation Humbug, police identified nine suspects, including the school owner Jaswant Singh, instructors, three independent examiners and two medical doctors.

While CTHRC’s training program is renowned for its safety components, one of the criticisms of the course is that its $7,000 price tag is too steep for new entrants and does not help solve the industry’s driver shortage.

However, there’s word that the province will cover a portion of the course like it does with trades or other regulated post-secondary programs, CP reports.

— with files from Canadian Press