Canada All Set To Bring In Its Own ELD Mandate

In an attempt to make Canada’s roads safer for travel, The Ministry of Transport, Ontario is all set to roll out its own ELD mandate by the end of this year. ELD, which stands for Electronic Logging Device, was announced by the Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau in an attempt to make the truck drivers less susceptible to fatigue.

This welcome announcement comes in after the United States of America made the ELD mandate binding in December 2017. While the draft versions of this rule have been already published in the official news outlet of the Canada Government, the final version is expected to be out by 2020. The rules are said to be more or less similar to those being spelled out by the United States. However, Canadian mandate will differ from its United States counterpart in a few ways i.e. –

  • Limit of Personal Conveyance – The Canadian mandate will put a limit of 75 kilometers in 24 hours for personal conveyance time or distance, while in the U.S. has not set any limit on the amount
  • Location and Identity Data Sources – U.S. mandate requires suppliers to get a location for different events during shipping such as yard movement, duty status, and unassigned vehicles moves. On the other side, Canadian mandate will require the government supply vendor to provide the location file to import products to capture locations.
  • Data Transfer and Enforcement – The Canadian mandate will have the ELD solution that will measure and comprehend a cycle, 1 and 2. In the US the carriers are also required to send enforcement highly detailed files and reports of eight-day but in Canadian mandate, carriers are required to share or transfer data of the 14-days log data in the form of PDF.

It is often observed that drivers work more than the standard hours of service which causes fatigue and fatigue is directly linked to higher crash rates. Additionally, fatigue in drivers of commercial vehicles has especially been the cause of worry due to the fact that accidents caused by commercial transport vehicles cause more severe injuries and fatalities than motor vehicles. Thus, an ELD system will ensure that both, the drivers as well as the owners, comply with the existing hours of service prescribed by the rules and help lessen the accidents caused by driver’s fatigue.

Though these rules would affect only the federal carriers as of now, the Canadian Transport Minister, Marc Garne is encouraging individual provinces and territories to bring in such ELDs in their respective jurisdictions. “Three years ago, our government became the first in Canada to publicly endorse the use of electronic logging devices,” said Steven Del Duca, Ontario’s minister of transportation. He further added, “I commend Transport Canada for taking this important step toward making these devices mandatory.”

The ELD mandate will not have any effect on the Hours of Service of the truck drivers. It will just change the way in which how the reporting time and signing off time of the driver is reported. The ELD mandate will consist of regulation-compliant devices which will be connected to the ECM directly. The stakeholders, namely the truck drivers, carriers, owners, and other members of the transport industry, have been given a 60-day comment period to evaluate the proposed mandate.

The move is being widely welcomed by drivers as well as bodies such as the Canadian Trucking Alliance and is being termed as a positive step in the attempt to improve road and driver safety. President of the Canadian Trucking Alliance Stephen Laskowski, while endorsing the ELD mandate said, “ELDs will ensure optimum compliance with the hours-of-service regulation, reducing commercial vehicle collisions related to fatigue and cognitive driver distraction.”

As the ELD mandate will see Canada doing away with the outdated paper logging system, it will help in saving time too. Plus, it will also mean that fleet owners can no longer pressurize drivers to work overtime by manipulating records. By adopting this technology, the trucking industry can ensure that there is compliance with laws in the trucking sector.

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