NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. (June 20, 2005) — Slow but steady. Even after all the setbacks and delays, Canada may actually have a final hours-of-service regime before the U.S.

As regulators down south scramble to rewrite an HOS mandate that will appease critics and courts by September, Canada is putting on the finishing touches on its own set of rules for truck-driving hours.

It’s been almost two years since the Canadian hours-of-service rules were published in the Canada Gazette Part I, and after years of studies, consultations, and comments, Canada will publish a final HOS rule in the Gazette II in the next “couple months” — likely by August — confirmed Dr. Ian Noy, director of Standards Research and Development for Transport Canada.

Dr. Noy acknowledged that the final rules have already been delayed several times, and while he wouldn’t commit to a firm date for implementation, he said he was confident truckers would be complying by the end of 2006.

“Of course, nothing is firm,” Noy told members of the Private Motor Truck Council of Canada at their annual conference last week. “When it’s published it will have an effective date agreed by the provinces and territories.”

He said the extra year will allow provinces and territories to implement the new rules, write an interpretation guide, as well as allow carriers and enforcement to train drivers and officers.

Noy said that while Transport Canada has been keeping an eye on U.S. HOS proceedings, the turmoil down there never affected the Canadian process.

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia threw out the American HOS rules that came into force January 2004. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration now has until September this year to rewrite the rule so that it complies with a statute requiring the agency to consider the rule’s impact on the health of drivers.

The rules here basically haven’t changed since the Canada Gazette I publishing. They consist of 13 hours driving, 14 hours on-duty, 10 hours off (eight consecutive), with a 16-hour elapsed working window.

As Today’s trucking reported last fall, the rules were revised from the original proposal to include a sleeper berth exception in order to keep them compatible with the U.S.

A combination of consecutive sleeper berth time and off-duty time totalling 10 hours may be used to comply with the 10-hour off-duty requirement in sleeper berth operations and in situations where a driver moves from a sleeper berth to a non-sleeper berth operation. Any two sleeper-berth periods (each at least two hours long) totalling 10 hours may be used in calculating the 10-hour requirement. Sleeper berth periods not used in calculating the 10-hour rest period must be included in calculating the 14-hour on-duty limit.