Shocking as it was, I have to tell you that recent allegations against a Calgary truck-driving school — that it sold forged Class 1 licences — didn’t really surprise me. It’s evidence of serious gaps in the way our training is done.

There are many schools that do a fine job in preparing folks for the trucking task, but you don’t have to look hard to find problems elsewhere: there is no provincial accreditation process with teeth sufficient to force rigorous standards on these schools. A national standard? Fat chance.

Out of honest ignorance, probably, some of these schools don’t cut it. The rest? Well, I know that some are great, some may be awful, and the choice to be one or the other is in the proprietor’s hands. They can pretty much do what they like.

Here’s what a study prepared for the Canadian Trucking Human Resources Council (CTHRC) in 2002 said about this: “Based on the number of schools identified by this survey, it is estimated that across Canada, more than half of the truck driving training schools fall outside of any licensing or registration process and would be considered not regulated.”

That’s ridiculous. Called a “Review of Truck Driver Training Schools,” the report looked at 206 schools and how each province regulates these institutions. It’s not a pretty picture, because even where there is control, there’s not much of it. Schools can be licensed, registered, or totally unregulated, the review said. And these three categories can co-exist within the same province!

I find this hard to believe, but I’d bet that the provinces have almost nobody to inspect these schools and enforce whatever thin standards are actually in place anyway.

Ironically, it appears that Alberta has one of the tougher regulatory regimes. It actually licenses them, demands that records be kept, and requires both a security bond and a curriculum that meets a minimum standard. Not very tough on the face of it, but this is a relative thing.

So if there really aren’t standards worth having, what do the schools do? Fact is, they’re all over the map. Most schools, said the survey, used their own material for course content. They had widely divergent enrolment criteria, if any at all. Average training time varied from 41 to 288 hours. And the course cost “…ranged from a low of $2,436 in British Columbia to a high of $6,740 in Atlantic Canada.”

The majority of schools do the very best they can, I’m sure, but with no help from provincial authorities. And I’m not sure they get much help from the carriers who hire their graduates either. I think fleets have to demand real standards or create them on their own. Many do exactly that, of course, by working closely with local schools and in some cases by running their own.

One of the better examples of such co-operation is an Ontario effort that has three carriers and a school working with the government to establish a driver apprenticeship program. MacKinnon Transport, TST Truckload Express, and Schneider National Carriers, led by Kim Richardson of KRTS Transportation Specialists, are showing the way here.

But, unlikely as it sounds, it looks as if some carriers take an almost cavalier attitude to who they hire and how they do it. In another study done for the CTHRC, this one just last year, it’s reported that only 51.6 percent of private fleets and 60.3 percent of for-hire carriers use road-test results as criteria for hiring new drivers. Shouldn’t that be much closer to 100 percent, or am I missing something?

And checking references? Apparently only 69.4 percent of them do it. The report is called “Profile of Driver Shortage, Driver Turnover and Future Demand Estimates,” and in the context of the Calgary fiasco, it holds another key observation: only 15.5 percent of private carriers and 14.8 percent of for-hire outfits care about the training school that their would-be employee attended. No wonder there are bad schools out there. No wonder we don’t have any standards worth having.

It’s clearly a chicken-and-egg thing: carriers know there are few standards so they don’t expect much from schools. And since they expect so little, the provinces aren’t motivated to demand much either. So a situation exists where schools can be as good — or as bad — as they feel like being.

We need to fix this, obviously, if we’re to have schools that truly answer the need. The shortage of skilled drivers won’t get better if we continue to demonstrate that we don’t much care how the newbies are trained.