(0:00 - 1:57) In 2018, 16 members of the Humboldt Broncos, kids, were killed in a horrific crash when their bus was struck by a semi-trailer after the driver of the truck ran a stop sign. The driver was from India and was subsequently charged with 16 counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death and 13 counts of dangerous operation of a vehicle causing bodily injury. Just a few weeks ago, three people were killed in Florida when a truck being operated by an illegal immigrant from India ignored the signs and made an illegal U-turn on the highway.   Immigration in both countries, but especially here in Canada, has increased dramatically under the current liberal federal government. Which begs the question, are we seeing more fatal accidents involving immigrant drivers because there are more immigrant drivers or is there something else at play? Something perhaps far more nefarious that is being done with the tacit cooperation of our respective governments. Gord Magill is a fellow journalist and he has decades of experience himself as trucker.   In fact, some time ago, I interviewed Gord on The Coutts Four. Anthony Olienick, one of the two who are still in jail as political prisoners, owned a trucking company. Gord joins me today to reveal what his research into the degradation of our trucking industry makes very clear. If we do not take steps to ensure that the people driving trucks on our roads are qualified to do so and to do so safely, accidents like the ones we've been seeing are going to be common occurrences on our roads.   Gord, welcome back to the show. Well, hey, thanks for having me again, Will. Been a little while.   (1:58 - 2:01) It has indeed. And I know you've been busy. You're a journalist as well.   (2:02 - 2:16) You used to be a trucker and there's been an awful lot of talk about the airlines and pilots collapsing and the potential for that to turn into a disaster. But you have been tracking down something that really we should be much more concerned about. Please tell us about it.   (2:18 - 3:15) So people would have noticed that there's a lot more, at least there's a perception that there's a lot more truck crashes as of late, some fairly high profile ones making it across social media and the regular media. And there's some statistics to indicate that, you know, truck-involved fatal collisions have been on a steady increase in America since 2016 and likewise in Canada. And as you mentioned, I've been a trucker for most of my life and I do write about it.   I don't know if I would consider myself a journalist, but I do pay attention to these things. And I am in the middle of writing a book about the sort of fate of the North American truck driver. And these incidents are piling up and they typically involve recent arrival immigrant groups who have got into trucking with gusto in North America in the last few years.   (3:15 - 13:04) And this one particular incident in Florida seems to have touched a nerve with everybody and kind of set the internet on fire for about two weeks. Now, for those viewers who aren't familiar with that story, what was it that happened in Florida? This gentleman had pulled his rig over on the shoulder of the Florida Turnpike near a community called Fort Pierce on the east side of the peninsula and was attempting to execute an illegal U-turn. So taking the truck and trailer and driving it across the median to go back to the other direction.   Maybe he missed his exit, maybe got lost. I don't know that part, but illegal nonetheless. Didn't check, pulled across traffic and another vehicle doing at least 70 miles an hour went right into his trailer, instantly killing all three occupants inside.   As the investigations into this incident progressed and we found out more about what happened and dash cam video of the incident was released, it set people off because the driver of the truck had immigrated to the United States illegally across the border from Mexico into California in 2018 with no visa. Through various poor immigration policies and lack of border enforcement, this gentleman was given employment authorizations, was eventually issued a CDL in the state of Washington and then another one in California. Never appears to have not picked up English in the whole time he has been here.   And yeah, just took the lives of these three people. And the thing that gets me about this is, you know, oftentimes tragedy is what it takes to get political movement on problems in any particular area. And I've covered the trucking industry now in my writings for many years and this incident's not the first one.   And we see a pattern here where recent arrivals to the United States and Canada get into the trucking industry by various methods. The training of these gentlemen is often non-existent to extremely poor. The licensing systems have not changed their rules or their barriers to entry in many, many years.   In fact, there's whole industries that have sprung up around insourcing this labor into the North American trucking market. And a number of the companies that hire these guys themselves are their various co-ethnics and they've sort of parasitized themselves in the trucking industry. At the moment, there's estimates that, you know, 20 percent of the United States trucking industry is being operated by migrants.   I think that that number is low. It's probably higher, given anecdotal evidence and from what I hear out on the road. And it's being done with the encouragement of large companies like Amazon, whose in-house load distribution system for securing trucks, Amazon Relay, tends to hire these sort of carriers who have very dodgy safety ratings, employ people who are not very good at driving.   The Wall Street Journal and CBS have both done their own separate investigations into Amazon and the trucking contractors they hire and have found that in the last decade, the carriers working for Amazon have been involved in collisions that have killed 150 people. And people see with their own eyes when they're driving around. They see really bad behavior out on the road.   We see films. Everybody's got a cell phone now. We're seeing way more footage of bad driving behavior.   You know, guys driving down the road with their feet on the dashboard, playing with their phones. We see there's another problem that facilitates this called chameleon carriers, where some small company will be registered with the authorities here in the United States and in Canada. And they'll have a registration number in the United States.   It's called the US DOT number and an MC number. And what they'll do is there's an open market in these registrations because the government doesn't cancel them when an entity goes out of business. You can sell your MC number.   And so some of these carriers who are eventually caught by the authorities with, you know, defective equipment, drivers not following the rules, they accrue these points. And when one of these carriers accrues enough of these points that they're forced out of business, they just take the drivers and the equipment and move them all to another LLC with another motor carrier number and they go right back into business. So the mechanisms by which we are supposed to hold these people to account and remove them from the highway have been compromised.   And it appears that the government's not doing very much to address that. So we've got these companies that basically that's almost like a shell corporation. They operate, then they get into trouble.   They shut it down. They move all the assets to another corporation. So is this leaving cases where there's no insurance? Sometimes there isn't.   So some of these companies in the United States will purchase a small commercial, they call it commercial auto insurance, which means trucks. I don't know what they call it, auto, but anyhow, they'll buy a policy and it'll apply to a small number of trucks, one, two, maybe 10, but they'll own 50 trucks or 100. And they'll just photocopy it and put it in all the trucks and pretend it's a fleet policy.   And so there are literally trucks driving around with no insurance on them. And now, I guess the thing that's occurring to me here is, I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Canada, of course, we have stations where trucks are supposed to pull over to check in, weigh in. Is there no structure in place to check when they go through there, whether or not all their documentation is correct? Well, this is the problem is that you've got two different, um, you have, you have two different areas, right? So you've got the guys at the scales, right? So, you know, you've got the MTO in Ontario or ICBC and, and they will check the truck's registration.   They will check the driver. They'll inspect the truck. They don't necessarily do the business side of it.   So how the truck, the entity that owns the truck's business is registered as sort of a separate jurisdiction. And a lot of times the inspection personnel don't have the sort of, you know, investigative tools or training to chase that stuff up. And it's hard to remove these guys from the road once they're out on the road.   Um, all of that stuff happens beforehand and it's, it's sort of different, uh, different enforcement agencies within the government who are supposed to check that stuff out. Now I can see another problem that you would sort of alluded to. You're talking about this incident in Florida where the driver had come from Mexico.   Now I lived in Mexico for a while and they have very different ideas of the rules of the road there. Not so bad in the tourist cities, but once you get outside of those, and even I encountered this in places in Mexico city, where you just ignore the signs because you know the other drivers are going to as well. You come up on an intersection and just because your light's green and the other one's red, doesn't necessarily mean you go.   You check first because there might very well be a truck who's going to come right through that intersection. He's not even going to stop, because that's just the way they do things. You know, it was, it was really freaky to my wife and daughter when we moved to Mexico for a while and driving around in their roads, they didn't want to do it because it was chaos.   But on the other hand, what came out of that, and I was certain during the time that we were there, that in the city we're in, I saw fewer accidents there that I would have seen here. And my theory was it was because they drive like that. So everybody's watching out for everyone else.   So what I'm thinking of is if that was the culture that this driver came from, when he did that U-turn on the highway, he was expecting that the other drivers were going to watch out for him and stop. But of course it doesn't work like that in the US. Right.   So just for a point of clarification, the driver involved in this incident had crossed the border from Mexico, but he was from India. He was an India national. He was from Punjab.   Now I've never been to India, but I've heard that it's like that there as well, that there's lots of places where you just ignore the signs. It's watch out for everybody else. Right.   So you bring up a great point. Well, driving culture is unique to different countries and different cultures, right? And the United States has a very particular driving culture. Canada has one that's quite similar.   We are rule followers, right? Like, and we understand that rules are there to keep everybody safe and prevent incidents, especially traveling at high speeds on the interstate. Now, someone that drives in Mexico, different driving culture. India, again, different driving culture.   I read an article the other day that said something like 180,000 people die in traffic fatalities in India every year because it, again, it is chaotic. And the problem we have with immigrants coming to North America and then just being given licenses is that you can't shake that loose out of somebody, right? Like these particular behaviors, these modes of thought don't immediately leave you once you move countries, right? That's like programming inside you as a person and how you operate and navigate reality, right? So this idea that like we can just insource all this labor from around the world and throw them into the trucking industry here and everything's going to work out fine is a faulty idea. And that's being borne out in the slow creep up of all these incidents and fatalities out on the highways.   (13:04 - 13:35) The United States trucking industry had done a pretty good job of trying to get their accidents and whatnot under control. And if you look at a graph, there's a nice long slope. All the fatal collisions are coming down, coming down, coming down to about 2016.   Then they start going up again. And then around 2020, 2021, they spike right up. And those two increases, 2016 and 2021, happen to coincide with some policy changes on the part of the United States government.   (13:35 - 14:09) They track exactly. So in 2016, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in the United States issued this memorandum, which told enforcement officials on the road doing inspections on trucks to not place out of service those drivers they found who could not communicate effectively in English. Because in the United States to get a commercial driver's license, since they first had CDLs in the 1930s, it's been a requirement that you communicate effectively in English, because you have to be able to read the signs, talk to cops, communicate with other people.   (14:10 - 14:28) It's just like a basic fact of life that the road is a place of public interaction and everyone's to be on the same wavelength. So Obama's administration comes along and they don't get rid of that rule. They just say, we're not going to place these guys out of service anymore.   (14:28 - 15:26) So they created a loophole. So that starts allowing these companies that will hire foreign labor, it gives them a little more wiggle room to not get caught. In 2021, as you'll remember during COVID, everyone's hanging out at home.   They're getting their free money from the government. A lot of people are ordering things online. Everyone's shopping online because everyone's afraid to go out.   And so there was a spike for trucking services. We called it the COVID demand spike. And so for most of 2021, truckers were making tons of money.   The rates were through the roof. And the American Trucking Association, this corporate lobby group who represents very large carriers, was upset that they were losing drivers to go work for smaller carriers and independent companies because they were offering them more money. So the ATA comes to the Biden administration and says, hey, we're having to pay drivers a 7% to 12% wage increase.   (15:26 - 15:39) And they didn't say it explicitly like, oh, we don't want to have to pay this. They just did their usual fatuous whining about a shortage of truck drivers, which there's not. There's always been an excess of people with CDLs versus jobs which require one.   (15:39 - 16:13) They just frame it as a shortage when what they have is a retention problem. So the Biden administration convenes this thing called the 2021 Trucking Task Force. They get all kinds of expert opinion about what to do to make sure supply chains were resilient and things got delivered.   And a number of people told the Biden Trucking Task Force exactly what I just said. There's lots of people with CDLs. Just pay people more.   Do something about the retention problem. They talked to a guy from MIT about how trucks get detained everywhere. And if we fix that up, it would shake out more capacity and make it more available.   (16:14 - 20:17) The Biden administration ignored all of that. And what they did, according to research from my friends at American Truckers United, is they effectively doubled the production of CDLs in 12 months. How did they do that? They didn't hire more state examiners.   They didn't open more truck driving schools. They said they were trying to get women and veterans and minority groups into trucking. But the actual truck training infrastructure, such as it exists, did not expand.   But somehow, they doubled the number of licenses. Typically, in one year, America will produce between 400,000 and 450,000 commercial driver's licenses. In 2022, in the 12 months after this task force, that number went up to 876,000.   Where did those people come from? According to the research from my friends at ATU, between 10 and 14 states cooperated with the Biden administration in reducing the standards and regulations by which you issue CDLs in order to give them to people, migrants, refugees, illegals, whatever you want to call them, because there was no way that the domestic supply of drivers, fresh new drivers who had just gone to CDL school, instantly doubled like that. And now we are seeing what's happened is people that don't speak English can't read road signs, like this gentleman in Florida cuts across the media and has no idea there's a sign right there saying no U-turns, he ignored it. And we're starting to see through the investigations into collisions that a number of crashes take place in construction zones, traffic's all piled up, some driver just comes flying into highway speeds because they couldn't read the signs telling them, you know, this lane is closed, slow down to 30 miles an hour, because they just don't speak English.   They have no way to like recognize signage. And that's a contributing factor to this increase in fatal collisions. Now, you said a couple of things there, Gord, that we have to unpack.   The first thing I want to do is make sure I completely understood you a few minutes ago when you said that technically they still have to have English proficiency to be licensed. But what you're telling me is when they're finding these people that don't have that English proficiency, they're not doing anything about it. They're not.   No. And like I say, a number of states that cooperated with the Biden administration are also now not cooperating with the Trump administration. So Trump and new transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, see what's going on.   They're shown what happened during the Obama administration with the waiver of this enforcement. And they, pardon me, Trump says, OK, cool. I'm giving out an executive order.   We're going to reinforce this old rule that Obama stopped enforcing. This is nonsense. English is the lingua franca of the road.   We have to make the road safer. We are going to reinforce it. A number of the same states that ATU have accused of issuing CDLs to people who don't even live in the United States are also the same states that are not participating in this new enforcement effort.   California, Washington state, a bunch of these states are just like, nope, we're not enforcing the ELP. We're not having our DOT enforce it because we don't believe it's a problem, even though the statistics show that it is. So just to be very clear, these states are knowingly putting drivers on the road behind the wheels of 18 wheelers who cannot read English.   Correct. And that's been a problem for a while. And we also have corrupt DMVs.   And this is not like a blue state, red state, Democrat, Republican thing, right? A number of CDL and I should say DMVs and DOT offices in Florida have been busted recently in bribery scams, where people show up, they don't do the testing, they don't take a road test, they just pay a bunch of money, and then they get a CDL. That's been happening in Florida. It's been happening in California.   (20:20 - 20:26) Without a road test. Yes. They're putting people behind the wheels of semis without a road test.   (20:27 - 20:32) Yeah. A number of states DMVs have been busted in the last few years doing this. That's correct.   (20:32 - 20:50) Bribery scams. California was doing it like years and years and years ago. California is like a one party state that is super corrupt.   And that's not just in the United States either. So Canada and the United States have a trade relationship. Our trucks go back and forth over the border.   (20:50 - 21:04) That's how I started. When I started trucking when I was younger, I was mostly coming to the US. Canada has a problem where about half a dozen provinces allow you to take your commercial driving license examinations and your theory tests in your own language.   (21:05 - 21:51) And so this is why we have tons of guys from BC and Ontario and Alberta, new Canadians, as it were, who don't speak a lick of English and are trucking throughout Canada and into the United States. A suggestion I've made because my friends at American Truckers United have spoken directly with US DOT officials about this. And I've said, get the guys in Michigan and New York and Washington State right up on the border and start testing these guys coming from Canada.   And if they don't pass, give them a fine, turn them around, send them back. Because sooner or later, it's going to be one of these guys involved. And don't we have the opposite problem too, that the ones that are being licensed in the US, some of them without even taking a road test, are passing into Canada and driving here.   (21:51 - 24:31) Is that correct? I would say that's less of a problem because typically, most of the freight going in and out of Canada is on Canadian trucks, just because that's sort of always been the way it is. Typically 80% of cross-border freight on the northern border is on Canadian trucks. We haul stuff down, we take the backloads back.   So usually there's like a smaller number of American truckers coming into Canada, but that's still a concern. And the problem isn't even so much the language, right? We have truckers from Quebec, there's always been Hispanic truckers in the Southwestern United States. Usually they pick up enough English to get by, typically aren't involved in too many problems.   But the issue is less the language and more the loopholes, where we have this system now, where just like with the H-1B visa scams, where American tech workers are being replaced at scale by people from India, American truck drivers are now being replaced at scale by people from all over the world. It's not just Indians or Mexicans or people from El Salvador, it's Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainians. There's a whole subdivision of the trucking industry in America.   Some of us call the Chicago Volvo Mafia, and it's a number of Eastern European companies that are based in Chicago, some down in St. Louis. And they explicitly only employ their homeboys from Eastern Europe. They often communicate in their own language, and they derive a market advantage by breaking the rules.   When what they do is this, in 2017, the United States federal government brought in this new mandate called ELDs, Electronic Logging Devices. These are tracking systems that are supposed to help keep track of a truck driver's hours operating, and you know where they are, and it's supposed to prevent you from driving in excess of the allowable number of hours per day and per week. Well, guess what? Those systems are hackable.   And the apps that they give drivers for these ELDs, there's a certification process with the FMCSA to approve them, but it's self-certified. So you fill out this paperwork saying you did all the things, and you hand it in, and then they approve it, and there's no checking. So a number of these ELD systems on American trucks are backdoored.   And these companies that are based in Russia or Ukraine or Serbia have services where guys located in offices in Europe will backdoor into the driver's ELD, mess with their hours records, and then say, hey, now you have another five or eight or 10 hours to drive, and you can just keep going. And so those guys end up working double the number of hours they're legally allowed to. Then they end up driving tired, and they start losing their minds and falling asleep at the wheel and getting in accidents.   (24:32 - 25:18) And what is the maximum number of hours in the U.S. that they're allowed to drive per day and per week? In the United States, it's 11 hours per day up to 60 per week or 70 if you're on an eight-day cycle. In Canada, it's 13 hours per day, and then 70 on a seven-day cycle or 120 on a... I can't remember. There's like a funny little adjustment in Canada.   And then there's different rules north of 60. If you're north of the 60th parallel, you're allowed a bunch more hours. So to sum up everything you've told me, Gord, there's a strong possibility that there are commercial truck drivers in the U.S. driving around on their roads who never took a road test, don't speak English, and could potentially have been behind the wheel for the last 18 hours.   (25:20 - 26:57) I would say at scale. Since the Biden Trucking Task Force of 2021 and the fact that nobody's been doing anything about this at any level until very recently, I would say that the numbers of those guys that could fit that description you just gave to be half a million at very least. Wow.   Another problem, if I may briefly, is the economic effect, right? So after the 2021 COVID demand spike, the trucking industry entered what we call a freight recession. And it's been protracted. It's lasted for three years now.   And a lot of American trucking companies have been going out of business because they're waiting for the upcycle to come back so they can pay their trucks, pay their drivers, pay off their operating debts and keep going as businesses. And the shakeout is not coming because we keep having all these guys showing up from all around the world trucking in the U.S., having taken advantage of the Biden administration's weak to non-existent immigration policies and border enforcement. And then all of these holes in the system where they get CDLs and work for these companies to have layers of LLCs and you can't deal with anything with them.   So there's like a number of American truck drivers who are just being laid off, American trucking companies closing, and the whole system is being parasitized from without. So it's not just that we've got foreign truckers who don't speak English on the roads. We've got the companies being increasingly taken over by people who are motivated to hire the people from their own culture who speak their language and don't speak English.   (26:58 - 28:12) That's correct. It's being balkanized. Now there's something else you mentioned earlier, Gord, about them lowering the standards for people to qualify, to have a license, to be working on the roads.   In what way are they lowering those standards? So the big one is called, in America anyway, is the non-domiciled CDL. So it used to be to get a CDL, you had to live in the state which issued it. A non-domiciled CDL was meant for someone who just took their test in that state that hadn't, like, maybe you just moved to that state.   Maybe you lived, like my friend Justin, when he started trucking, he lived in Florida, but he went and took his truck driving school in Wisconsin. So he was issued a Wisconsin CDL, but he lived in Florida and he was going to be leaving. So it was called a non-domiciled CDL.   What's happened is under this Biden thing, they've took that non-domiciled thing to make it not even in the country. Like, they don't even live in America, right? So it's allowed, again, it's created this loophole where people that just showed up in the United States yesterday can get a CDL, when the intent of that was for domestic people moving around within the country. Another thing they did was obviously removing the requirements to even speak English.   (28:13 - 28:34) Different states have different, you know, minimum hours standards, some of them less, some of them more. So they've reduced the vetting on their training, English language proficiency requirements, and the fact that whether or not they even live here and whether or not they have work authorizations. Those are the key things that were reduced.   (28:35 - 28:40) Wow. Now, Gordon, I'd like to focus now more on Canada. We've talked about it a little bit.   (28:40 - 33:57) And I know from seeing some of your other talks on this interviews you've done that you mentioned something about Ontario and unemployment there driving a lot of foreign truckers into the business. Right. So the trucking industry in Canada has likewise seen a major penetration by recent immigrant groups, especially our friends from India.   And the Indian trucking companies typically, you know, they, I'll just say they engage in ethnic nepotism. They hire their own. And what happens is, is those companies are discovering the same thing that domestic trucking companies have found, which is the job is hard.   It doesn't pay very well. And guys get sick of it. So they have like a retention and turnover problem.   So the Indian companies are now hiring other Indians who came to Canada on a student visa or one of these temporary foreign worker visas. And they came to Canada, they went to school, they discovered that, you know, the job prospects aren't as good as they were told. They were sold a bill of goods about what their future life in Canada is going to be like, and they need money.   So, I mean, they're just, you know, they're following incentives and they find out that, oh, hey, a bunch of other Punjabi people are in the trucking business. Maybe I'll go trucking. So the Punjabans have recreated the driver retention problem that many domestic trucking companies already had.   And they've transferred it to themselves. We've got a situation here, if I'm getting the right picture, and sadly I think I am, where our trucking industry quality of safety is degrading rapidly due to licensing people from other countries who, as we discussed earlier, may come from a country where the rules of the road are not like they are here. Sometimes they can't speak English, so they can't read the signs.   And our government is bringing in more and more of them in droves. So how long is it before, because a lot of them, I'm sure, will work cheaper than a Canadian would. How long, I mean, I guess what I want to ask Gord is, do you have statistics right now on how many drivers, truck drivers, on our Canadian roads are not from this country, at least not recently? So it's hard to sort of nail this stuff down because the government doesn't often categorize things by your immigration status or what country you are from, right? It's sort of like blank slate.   But the Punjabi community have been very aggressive with getting into trucking and taking advantage of the very low barrier to entry that exists in that particular business. And they have bragged that they have control over 50% of the trucking market in Toronto and Vancouver. It's anecdotal, but I mean, just look around.   And in the United States, it's growing at a somewhat rapid clip here. And again, with the cooperation of major corporations, they don't care. They're just like, hey, I'm getting a discount on my trucking because these guys showed up here and cut the rate in half what the locals are doing it for.   And you'll get these companies who do pay their drivers less because what they do is, there's an indentured servitude program, especially in Canada, where some of these guys hold the fact that if you came to Canada, let's say on a student visa and you want to stay, you decide to get into trucking, you go work for one of these Indian-owned trucking companies, the guy who owns that company knows that you want to stay and knows that if you complete X number of years in the same job, that you'll get your permanent residency card. So they just abuse them. And it's like, whatever, if you don't like how I'm treating you, if you don't like the low pay, if you don't like being on the road for weeks at a time without going home, that's fine.   I'll just fire you. And then your permanent residency dreams are gone. So it's sort of like a quasi indentured servitude program going on in Canada.   It's been revealed that similar scams are going on in the United States, especially with the sort of Russian and Serbian guys. And another problem in the United States, obviously there's plenty of Hispanic migration people from Central America. And those guys, they tend to stay in the South, but there are trucking companies in Texas that are taking advantage of this, often owned by their same co-ethnics.   Trucking companies owned by Mexicans or El Salvadorians or Hondurans who are in the United States legally have set themselves up a business. They hire their co-ethnics and they just treat them like crap and do the same thing. If you don't like the low pay and conditions, well, you know what? It's worse back home, isn't it? So they force these guys to work ridiculous hours.   They run junk equipment. And again, it's to the benefit of some of the largest corporations in North America who, when anything happens, they just wipe their hands of it, right? And all these accidents, all those collisions where these small scummy trucking companies employing migrants get in accidents for Amazon, Amazon's just like, hey man, they're a contractor. That's not our problem.   (33:58 - 35:41) And you just said something else, Gord, that flipped a switch in my head, something I hadn't considered yet. We were talking about the drivers, of course, but you just mentioned junky equipment. Now, of course, it's always, at least I think it's always been the case here in North America, at least for a long time, that you had a legal obligation to make sure that your trucks were safe to be on the road.   So are we starting to see problems with that as well, where the trucks themselves might be dangerous? Oh yeah, no, totally. So there's some colleagues of mine started this new software program for carrier vetting. It's called surgecarriers.com. And you can punch in the motor carrier number of any US-based carrier and it will give you all their registration information because it's public.   And it'll also give you their inspection history. And out of service, like equipment out of service violations are through the roof, like brakes out of adjustment, tires flat, airlines leaking, you name it, problems with bearings and seals, leaks, whatever. Because again, when you're not charging your clients enough money so that you can undercut everybody else, that means you're not spending money on maintenance.   So we have dangerous drivers who are often not trained well enough, don't speak English. Maybe their work authorization in North America is questionable. And the people they work for are not spending money on equipment.   So we have a major, major problem here. The Americans are starting to realize that, right? Like Sean Duffy, I'll give him some credit. Secretary Duffy is starting to make some moves to try and clamp down on this.   (35:41 - 37:00) The United States DOT is currently involved in an investigation with those states I mentioned for issuing CDLs to people who shouldn't have had them. But all of this stuff is just starting. Canada is more difficult, right? Like some people would have seen that CBC Marketplace documentary from October about these scammy truck driving schools in Brampton.   But like, because Canada is like way more woke and the government is now, you know, they're clearly not operating at the benefit of average Canadians. There is nothing happening in Canada to clamp down on any of this whatsoever. And we've been talking about the regulatory changes in the U.S. that have lowered the standards.   What kind of changes have happened here in Canada in recent years? Well, you have sort of base level corruption, right? So in Ontario, the Ministry of Transportation has subcontracted out the testing, you know, to this company called Drive Test. There's some corporation that owns it all and it's all privatized and it's subject to the sort of same corruption incentives as anywhere else. And this is what the Marketplace guys were investigating, you know? They found people who are literally telling potential truck drivers, we train you to the test, cheap as possible, getting you to pass the test, nothing else.   (37:00 - 40:30) You're not learning how to drive in snow, chain up in the mountains in BC or Alberta or anything, any of the other stuff you need to know as a driver. Like when I got into the business, okay? My father was a trucker, my uncles were truckers, my grandpa was a trucker. I learned from the ground up.   I would help my dad wash trucks when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, I got underneath trucks and trailers with the mechanics, learned how to grease, learned how to, you know, diagnose problems, help them fix stuff, help them change tires. Then I graduated to helping guys load trailers.   Then I eventually got my license and I worked local for a couple of years. It didn't send me too far away. I did like a sort of quasi apprenticeship program where I knew that everything about the trucks inside and out, I knew how to fix them.   I knew how to diagnose problems and I learned how to drive in a graduated fashion. That's not how people get into trucking anymore. They go to dodgy little scammy truck driving schools that only teach you to pass the bare minimum of the state or provincial tests and nothing more.   And then in the eyes of the government, that person who just passed the test that just got their class AZ in Ontario or class one in Alberta or BC is the same level of qualifications as me with 28 years of experience, having gone through something of an apprenticeship program at the beginning of it all, right? And it's this lack of distinction. It's this lack of understanding hierarchy and skill and competency on the part of the government that is part of what's going on here. So we've got drivers on the roads in Canada who have gone through licensing mills and come from countries where it may never snow.   And we're putting behind the wheel of an 18 wheeler with 10 tons behind them and 10 try 40 or 50. Okay. Let's make the LK show.   I've never driven a truck, so I'm not quite sure what the capacity is, but yeah, 40 or 50 tons behind them. And now they're coming into a major city and it's just started snowing and they've never driven on snow before. We see this every winter.   Unreal. Now another issue occurs to me, Gordon, it's not, it's not near as important because it's not a safety issue, but seeing our trucking industry, the shipping being taken over by people from other countries. And we discussed that issue before with drivers in Mexico, but it's also, it's a North American thing, the European thing that we are very stuck on sticking to schedule, being on time.   It's a cultural thing for us. And a lot of these people come from countries where that's not the culture where, you know, it just happens when it happens. So are we starting to see a drop too in timeliness of deliveries? Is it degrading that part of the industry as well? There are certain areas where there's definitely a degradation in the service.   The delivery timing delivery thing is complicated because trucking's got this thing called the detention problem, which pre-dates any migration stuff where a driver's time is not valued at all. Like drivers don't get paid overtime. We don't get paid for sitting, waiting to load or unload.   And that is one of the major problems in logistics. And in fact, I argue that that problem is why we have so many, many drivers being insourced here because the capacity utilization percentage of our trucking fleet is low. The industry believes it needs more trucks and more drivers to make up for that instead of a more efficient use of what we already have.   (40:30 - 40:45) This is the sort of problem that drives the insourcing. And this is something that like the government's never done anything about because there's been no cost associated with it. It doesn't cost some company to have a bunch of trucks sitting so they don't have to pay.   (40:45 - 41:03) And then because truck drivers are exempted by law from overtime pay, and many of them are paid by the mile, this disconnect in the system causes a whole lot of delays. And because of that, we believe we need more . So now we get more insourced labor here.   (41:04 - 41:10) All right. Now, Gord, you've been a trucker for most of your life. You've researched all of this.   (41:10 - 43:48) Let's talk solutions. If you were somehow given the ability to talk to our government and tell them what needs to be done, how do we fix this before some foreign driver killing people on our roads in a semi becomes daily news? Well, it is almost daily news because I track it. We don't see it across there because sometimes they're not as like, you know, inflammatory as this one in Florida.   But if I was in charge in Canada, no more theory tests in your native language, English, French. That's the official languages. Take your back at you do all all stages of your testing, theory, training, road tests.   Everything is done in English. And if you can't do it, you're not getting a license. End of story.   Same in the United States. I would also impose a graduated licensing system on truckers like they have in New Zealand and Australia. I would make exemptions to it for like rural and farm kids and people that not operate equipment and people that can demonstrate competency.   But in general, in New Zealand and Australia, you don't get to go from having a car license to pulling a semi by going to some course. You have to drive a smaller truck for one year and then you can graduate onward to driving a bigger truck. If we impose that here in North America, this insourcing thing ends immediately because they can't.   The whole economics of this is based on quick turnaround, throw people in the seat, throw people in the seat. If we had a graduated licensing system that would guarantee people more practice with smaller vehicles first, and then it totally terminates the insource labor thing because it just makes it untenable for them to do it. Right.   And that's a very ground up solution. I agree with you completely. That's where it needs to be done.   But in the meantime, we still have a problem. And we were talking earlier about the way stations in the US and I was asking, well, why weren't they catching them there? And you pointed out it was because we're talking about two different branches of the government and the people who work at the way stations are not the people who are concerned with your licensing. And I'm going to assume it's the same thing here in Canada.   Are there ways we could fix the current system to catch these people who can't speak the language, probably aren't qualified to be on the road when there's snow on it? Do you think there's anything we can do about that? Well, catching them at the scale is to try and catch horses that are already out of the barn. I don't know that there's anything we can do because I don't believe there's the political will. Canada's way far gone woke and progressive than the United States is.   (43:49 - 46:24) And I don't think you are going to see provincial authorities tell their truck inspectors to go after the problem children, the usual suspects, because it wouldn't look good in the media. It would appear as if, you know, attacking minority groups rather than addressing this for the safety issue that it is. So we've got a problem that we've been countering in our country so often in recent years that any politician who tries to do something about this is going to be accused of being a racist.   They might be. Okay. Like I say, Canada, again, you know, but we can stop letting them out.   And again, English or French language only and graduated licensing, because we can't have these guys sitting up their scummy little truck driving schools and throwing people off the deep end with no training. That's how we end up with the Humboldt Broncos crash. Like we can't keep doing this.   We cannot keep doing this. Yes. Now, aside from the obvious of call your MLA, call your MP, viewers who are concerned about this, do you have any suggestions for what we who are not truckers could possibly do to try to fix this problem? Well, be clear eyed about what it is.   And, you know, just don't don't buy into the media or the government when they lie to you about it. You know, like when the CBC does their thing and doesn't name any of the guilty parties, just understand what's going on here. And yes, get a hold of your MPPs or MLAs or MPs and say, we want something done about this.   We want these scummy truck driving schools closed down. We want the licensing mills dealt with. We want the standards by which those licenses are issued to be increased.   Like you have to make these demands. And then when you're out on the road, be careful. Just stay away from these guys.   And, you know, if some guy passes you, it is like driving aggressively or tailgating you. And you can get a photograph of the truck and just call cops, just do what you can to get some sort of like local enforcement on this and let the cops know that you don't want to have to deal with dangerous drivers on the road. All right.   Gord, thank you so much for your time, for the research you've done into this. You're writing a book and you're saying it's coming out in the spring. Yeah, I'm almost done.   I'm working on the very last chapter right now. The book is called End of the Road, Inside the War on Truckers. And it's a broad overview of how we got to this place today.   (46:24 - 46:44) When truck drivers used to be understood as the knights of the road, highly respected professionals, paid well, everybody loved them and thought they were great, to today where they are a menace and those old school drivers are long gone. How did we get here? What caused all this? That's basically what the book is about. It'll be coming out in March of 2026.   (46:45 - 47:05) All right. When it's out, Gord, you let me know and we'll notify all of our members and viewers via email. All right.   Awesome. And in the meantime, you can follow the rest of my writings at autonomoustruckers.substack.com. I'm also on Twitter @GordMagill. All right.   Thank you so much, Gord. Thank you, Will. Pleasure.