The Humboldt Accident - Who gets Punished?

Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, the driver of the truck involved in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash is awaiting the sentence that will be imposed upon him for the deaths of 16 young hockey players. There is no doubt that he is guilty - he has admitted to it. He plead quilty, it needs to be stated, at the first opportunity to do so. The only remaining question is how should he be punished.

Canadians need to be very clear that any sentencing will be a punishment - there is not a rehabilitation component to his incarceration. Sidhu will be deported back to India as soon as he leaves whatever prison he is sent to. He will be sentenced because he caused an accident that killed and injured people. He was not on drugs or drunk; he was not doing anything distracting; he was not over-tired; it was not intentional - he just made a mistake. The desire to hurt him, to take away his freedom to somehow alleviate the families' pain is understandable - it is just not very logical nor will it have any capacity to change the attitude of other truck drivers. It will not force the people who have the responsibility to ensure that the rules are followed - do so.

I would argue that I have driven with more truck drivers than most. I have driven with truck drivers with just a few years experience and with old grizzled veterans with forty or more years of driving time. I would never say that I know what all truck drivers are like but given the fact that I have spent hundreds of hours driving with them or hanging around truck stops, I do have a sense of how some of them think.

It would be fair to say that almost all of the truckers I have known have been irritated by the rules imposed upon them. Truck drivers get paid by the number of kilometres that they travel. Anything that prevents them from eking out a few extra kilometres is an irritant. The log sheets are, at least for me, are complicated and time-consuming. But with one exception, all of the truck drivers I have travelled with, follow the rules and fill out the sheets reasonably accurately. There is frequently some minor bending of the rules, some twisting of the truth so that they can get time off with family or get to a destination at a better time, but t is almost always inconsequential. The one exception to this general compliance with Transport Canada's rules was a young immigrant from India who picked me up just outside of North Bay heading north. He was a new driver, spoke very little English and according to him - his boss filled out the log book for him. While he did take his sleep when it was time, the next morning, he and a fellow driver switched trailers. My driver went south with a new trailer and the other driver took his trailer further north and then west. A practice that seems unusual.

Scattered across the country are weigh stations, where if they are open, trucks must pull in, be weighed so that they are not over loaded (if they are - the tucker, not the company pays the fine) and occasionally the inspectors check the log book. But, depending on how many trucks are in the lineup, it can be a time-consuming process. The inspectors have neither the time or the desire to look at every log book. Weigh stations are opened on some unknown schedule and truckers if they can, will avoid them. Having more stations open more often would perhaps be a partial preventative to accidents.

However, the owners of the companies must always know what is happening. It is inconceivable that they could have trucks on the road and not know who was not following the rules. They are supposed to check log books, to supervise their employees. And the good companies do that. Some have gone so far as to install tracking devices on all of their trucks, others have installed software that disables the truck from operating once the truck has gone the allotted number of hours. Sukhmander Singh, owner and director of Calgary-based Adesh Deol Trucking Ltd and Sidhu's employer faces eight charges related to log book mismanagement. I would bet that he will not face prison time. Yet it is the owners of these companies that hire poorly trained drivers (I assume it is because they can pay them less), allow, if not encourage them to violate the rules, create practices that do nothing to ensure that the drivers understand their responsibilities or increase their skills, nor do they adequately support them when there are problems on the road.

Sidhu caused the accident and there should be consequences for him. But his boss will walk away with -perhaps only a fine. He should shoulder far more of the cost and the consequences. Only when trucking companies are forced to be accountable for the violations of their drivers will they stop encouraging them to do so. Maybe some serious jail time or the loss of the owner's licence to operate the company will remind them of their responsibilities.

Instead of sending Sidhu to jail for 10 years and wasting over a million dollars upon his care - why doesn't he just get deported now? Being kicked out of Canada sounds like a pretty serious consequence to me.