BANFF, Alta. – Have you heard the one about the trucker who walks into a truckstop diner?

He asks the new young waitress if he could get for breakfast, three flat tires, a pair of headlights and a few running boards.

Confused, she takes the order and heads to the Kitchen to ask the cook: "This trucker says he wants three flat tires, a pair of headlights and a few running boards?"

"Oh," the cook answers. "He means he wants three pancakes, two eggs – sunny side up — and a stack of bacon strips."

So, with this new information, the waitress goes back to the trucker and offers him a can of cooked beans.

"What’s this?" the trucker asks.

"Well, I figured while you were waiting, you might as well gas up."

Trucker humor, eh? That’s the joke Alberta Transport Minister Luke Ouellette opened with as he gave his annual state-of-the-ministry address at the Alberta Motor Transport Association management conference in Banff, Alta.

Only in the West could a politician be down-to-earth enough to make that joke work.

Moving on to more serious matters, though, Ouellette gave the group of fleet managers a department-industry update, including the news that the harmonized trade and regulatory agreements among the western provinces is beginning to bear fruit.

The economic partnership, Canada’s largest, has already begun consolidating 59 transport regulations, such as highway traffic rules, truck inspections, greenhouse gas reduction initiatives and size & weights, Full harmonization should be completed by the summer of 2013, he says.

After boasting about new provincial highway infrastructure investments (about $3 billion for new highway maintenance and improvements, systems and safety), Ouellette announced that after a rough start, the incentives for the Partners in Compliance (PIC) program are in place.

The self-governing safety evaluation program, which re-launched in 2007 after some initial problems, rewards carriers with such perks as scale bypass privileges and non-fee driver abstracts for maintaining a safety score above and beyond provincial standards.

Today, there are 34 companies that participate in the program.

Ouellette also announced that Alberta’s new TRAVIS permitting program – a 24/h online services site that allows fast and easy access to oversize and weight permits over the Internet – is expanding to include most municipalities and it should be province-wide by the end of the year.

As well, Alberta is set to implement a one-year pilot project at its Leduc weigh station for Smart Roadside.

The program will include weigh-in-motion scale technology, licence plate readers and transponders, new thermal imaging technology and instant real-time data downloading.