Alberta is revving up for a major overhaul of its trucking laws, with the Transportation Minister signaling a move to permanent, tougher legislation backed by strong public demand for safer roads.
Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen told True North in a year-end interview that stricter penalties and fines are being drafted as part of long-awaited updates to the Traffic Safety Act, which he said has gone largely unchanged for years.
“We’re also looking at jurisdictions around North America, what they’re doing to make sure that their roads are safer. Truckers, they’re amazing drivers out there. They used to be the best drivers on the road. There are still great truck drivers out there, but it’s these bad ones that are giving the industry a bad look,” he said.
The ministry’s focus on trucking echoes comments Dreeshen previously shared with True North at the Alberta UCP AGM, where he revealed that the top issue constituents have been raising with him is trucker safety.
“Truck safety is the number one thing that we’ve been hearing,” Dreeshen said. “Whether it’s our provincial bridges being hit by semis on the ring road, there’s been a whole bunch of incidents on Highway 2, as well as just bad driving from semi trucks.”
The legislative push follows extensive enforcement actions recently taken by the province.
Alberta shut down five unsafe driver training schools and removed 13 trucking companies from provincial roads for poor on-road performance, unsafe equipment or failure to meet mandatory safety standards. Several were identified as “chameleon carriers” attempting to resume operations under new names after being shut down elsewhere.
Dreeshen explained that these changes were a first step in rebuilding confidence in the industry. He also highlighted a more recent change to enhance trucker safety.
“If you are a truck driver and you get into an accident and you get fired from your job, you could kind of hide through the cracks of having that accident not show up on your driver’s abstract,” he said. “We’ve changed that rule now so that if a truck driver runs into a provincial bridge, that accident lasts with them and moves on to the next trucking company that would pick them up, so they know the type of driver that’s getting behind their wheel.”
The transportation minister also highlighted the results of a survey, which wrapped up on December 12 and had over 60,000 respondents, making it one of the largest surveys ever conducted by the provincial government.
He said roughly 96 per cent of respondents supported restricting commercial trucks from the far-left lane on highways with three or more lanes per direction. Support for increasing the speed limit to 120 km/h on highways was over 70 per cent.
Dreeshen previously highlighted to True North in a different exclusive interview that the province was short around 4,500 truck drivers. He hoped that working to elevate the profession to a certified national Red Seal trade would help address this shortage.
The planned overhaul would shift Alberta’s trucking crackdown from short-term enforcement actions into permanent law, embedding stricter penalties and enforcement tools into the province’s Traffic Safety Act as commercial traffic continues to grow on provincial highways.