TORONTO, (Mar. 9, 2005) — The Ontario Trucking Association is taking the provincial government here to task over its planned legislation to eliminate the Truck Transportation Act.

The OTA has told Ontario Minister of Transportation Minister Harinder Takhar that the proposal creates some potential problems for the trucking industry — especially the plan to eliminate operating authorities and the trust fund requirements for load brokers.

OTA’s chief concern is that unsafe carriers could contract with as many single-truck carriers as necessary in order to avoid CVOR responsibilities. The group says this loophole should be closed before the TTA repeal is proclaimed.

“The ‘operative’ CVOR is, and always been, a cornerstone of MTO’s ability to manage the safety performance of the trucking industry because it allows the Ministry to hold a carrier responsible for the actions of their employees/sub-contractors,” the OTA announced in a release. “Removing the requirement, as the repeal of the TTA will do, may have significant unintended consequences for road safety because MTO will be required to take action against a myriad of individual drivers rather than a few larger corporate entities.”

Such a situation, says the OTA, will create an un-level playing field between carriers that employ company drivers and those that contract owner-operators, since the latter will have the opportunity to off-load their CVOR responsibilities and costs and require that their owner-ops use or obtain their own CVOR certificates.

OTA President David Bradley is calling on the minister that the changes to the TTA should be delayed until a full assessment of the impact of the removal of the requirements for operating authorities has been conducted.

Meanwhile, Bradley is also pressing the minister to work with the trucking industry on a package of reforms to the CVOR system, including:

Redefine how accidents are incorporated into the CVOR and then recalculate the threshold; review the thresholds for inspections and convictions; review the thresholds for “warning letter”, “conditional” and “unsatisfactory;” review how the CVOR record is to be used as the vehicle for determining when an audit is required; and review the audit protocol.

“There is clearly inherent unfairness, inconsistency and contradiction in the current systems that government and industry should jointly address,” OTA says.

As for the trust fund requirements in the load broker regulations, the amendments to the TTA contained in Bill 179 revoked all of the regulations applicable to load broker activities, save for the provision which requires that load brokers retain carrier funds received from the consignor or consignee in a trust account. This requirement was to be transferred to the Highway Traffic Act. It is the strongly-held view of OTA that this provision is and remains necessary.