Ontario is cutting corners on truck driver training and licensing practices, audit reveals

Ontario is cutting corners when it comes to training truck drivers and licensing practices for CDLs, an audit has revealed. 

Ontario Auditor General Shelley Spence released the audit report on Tuesday, May 12th with 13 recommendations, which the province of Ontario has already accepted. 

According to BayTodayNews, the audit revealed that multiple trucking schools in the province do not provide thorough training, and fail to provide the required hours of training. The audit was conducted over six months using undercover driving students deployed at six different trucking schools in 2025. 

“We found that two private career colleges delivered 59.5 and 81 hours of the required minimum of 103.5 training hours. Two of our students were not taught key truck driving elements such as left turns at major intersections, reverse parking and emergency stopping,” Spence said.

The audit comes after research conducted between 2019 and 2024  “found that three registered private career colleges had falsified or altered student training records, four did not have records to demonstrate that some or all of their students had completed the required (entry level training) components, and three did not teach all of the required components.”

Spence says that currently, there is no ministry that monitors “road test pass or fail rates, post-licensing driving infraction rates or collision rates,” and that driving tests do not even assess all learned highway maneuvers at high speeds. 

Issues with fatal vehicle accidents in Ontario include a disproportionate amount of truck drivers, especially in the northern part of the region, Spence says, which is potentially a result of trucking schools cutting corners.