Trucking enforcement a challenge in Sask.

Commercial vehicle enforcement in Saskatchewan is a difficult challenge, according to an official with the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure.

The topic came into the spotlight last week when the sentencing hearing for Jaskirat Singh Sidhu – the driver responsible for the 16 deaths in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash April 6 – heard about his numerous logging violations. Sidhu’s logbook contained 51 federal violations and 19 provincial violations between March 26 and April 6, which would have been enough to pull him off the roads for 72 hours.

Blair Wagar, assistant deputy minister for the policy, planning and regulatory division of the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure, joined John Gormley Monday morning to talk about the difficulties in catching violations on the province’s vast road system.

“One of the challenges that our management team has is trying to put officers in locations where the most trucks are operating,” Wagar said. “We have a very extensive road network, and a lot of our provincial highway system – about 26,000 kilometres of it – goes beyond the national highway system.”

Officers with the Saskatchewan Highway Patrol have a lot of rules to enforce and a lot of roadways to cover, Wagar emphasized.

In addition to logbooks and driver fitness, he said officers are responsible for ensuring vehicles are safe and comply with weight and dimension regulations.

While the province operates a number of weigh-scales, Wagar said it’s a difficult balancing act to decide which scales should be manned and operated at specific times. Non-compliant truckers often try to dodge scales, he said, meaning officers need to catch them off-guard.

“They have a tendency to maybe park for a while if they know that we’re operating a scale, so the element of surprise is something that our officers spend a lot of time doing and planning around to make sure that we’re intercepting the ones that are not compliant and we’re trying not to intercept the ones that are,” he said. “That’s not an easy game to play.”

Wagar said officers intercept and interact with an average of 12,000-14,000 vehicles each year. Between April 1 and Dec. 31 of 2018, he said officers interacted with and inspected roughly 6,000 vehicles. The biggest challenge, he noted, is ensuring officers are stopping and inspecting the right vehicles in order to catch the non-compliant drivers.

“We would always like to do more,” Wagar said.