Alberta minister calls on feds to crack down on foreign trucking scams

OTTAWA — An Alberta cabinet minister is calling on the federal government to clamp down on immigration abuses in the commercial trucking sector, warning that inaction is putting lives at risk.

Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen said the inevitability of trucks crossing provincial lines puts the onus on Ottawa to act on fly-by-night trucking companies that exploit badly trained foreign drivers.

“Fraudulent (trucking companies) doing bad things in other provinces and then moving to Alberta is, unfortunately, something that’s been happening,” Dreeshen told National Post.

Dreeshen had a busy 2025 tackling fraudulent activities in Alberta’s trucking sector, shutting down five substandard driver training schools and 13 so-called chameleon carriers, which are trucking companies that change identities to hide past safety violations.

A web search shows that at least eight of the 13 shuttered chameleon carriers have ownership ties to the South Asian community.

The Edmonton-based Indo Canadian Driver Training School Inc., was on a list of three of the shut-down schools shared with National Post. The other two schools can’t be named as they’re appealing the government’s decision.

Dreeshen said that the federal government has stepped up “on the reporting side” to help the provinces and territories keep tabs on chameleon carriers, but added it needed to do a better job of vetting migrant truck drivers.

The federal government also announced steps to crack down on the intentional misclassification of truck drivers as independent contractors, a scam known as Driver Inc., in November’s budget.

Dreeshen stressed the need for better oversight of Indian nationals recruited to drive trucks in Canada.

“There’s more we can all do … to make sure that, if there are people from India who want to move to Canada, and want to get involved in the trucking industry, for them to know the expectations of the training that we have here in Canada,” said Dreeshen.

Roughly one in five of Canada’s truck drivers have South Asian backgrounds.

A recent report published in National Post argued there’s not enough publicly available data to determine whether South Asian drivers are disproportionately at-fault for deadly incidents on Canada’s highways.

Dreeshen said that Alberta recently started tracking the safety records of individual drivers , but added these records don’t yet include nationality. Prior to the change, which started on Dec. 1, accidents would go on the record of the driver’s company.

His comments came just before Friday’s report from the Alberta Next Panel , which recommended that the province hold a referendum in 2026 on exercising more control over immigration.

Dreeshen declined to say where trucking would fit in a “made in Alberta” immigration system, but did say the changes would focus on better tailoring immigration to the province’s economic needs.

“I think what it is going to look like, in 2026, is something similar to what Quebec has; where the province can indicate to the federal government, these are the types of immigrants that we want, this is the amount of immigration we think our province can handle,” said Dreeshen.

The House of Commons transportation committee just wrapped up hearings on the changing landscape of Canadian trucking . Committee chair, Liberal MP Peter Schiefke, didn’t respond to a request to comment on this story. Emails to the offices of federal Immigration Minister Lena Diab and federal Transport Minister Steve MacKinnon also went unanswered.

National Post rmohamed@postmedia.com

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