Canadian Trucking Alliance escalates “Stop Illegal Trucking” campaign
The Canadian Trucking Alliance’s (CTA) is intensifying its national enforcement campaign to stop illegal carrier activity. While the initiative is aimed squarely at federal policymakers, the compliance and operational risks it reveals extend well beyond the trucking sector itself. It reaches into the supply chains that keep fuel and convenience retail running.
At the centre of the campaign is a practice the CTA calls “Driver Inc.” a carrier model in which truck drivers are classified as independent contractors rather than employees, allowing operators to avoid payroll remittances, statutory benefits, and labour law obligations.
The CTA argues this isn't a grey area in employment classification, it is a systematic fraud at scale, with consequences that ripple outward through every industry dependent on road freight.
"We acknowledge and applaud the Government of Canada for taking a major first step by admitting the 'Driver Inc.' model is a threat to our economy and our safety and have committed to taking real action," said Stephen Laskowski, President and CEO of the CTA. "The scale of this lawlessness is massive, and concerned citizens need to ensure Ottawa matches the level of enforcement required to remove the lawbreakers off our highways while also lending support and resources to provinces to do the same.”
Carriers operating outside of legal compliance frameworks have little structural incentive to maintain standards in other areas of their operations. Industry observers and the CTA have noted a consistent pattern: non-compliance in tax and labour tends to accompany shortcuts in equipment maintenance, driver qualifications, and safety protocols: All factors with direct bearing on freight-reliability and road safety.
Know who hauls your product
The CTA has raised significant concern about the volume of carrier activity that currently operates without any audit history. Provincial regulatory authorities have reviewed only a fraction of active fleets, and no national enforcement mechanism exists to close that gap.
For convenience store operators sourcing from distributors or third-party logistics providers, this matters because carriers cutting corners on legal compliance rarely stop there. The same disregard for tax and labour law tends to extend to equipment maintenance, driver training and safety standards which puts your deliveries and the public at risk.
The danger of “Ghost Fleets” on the road
One of the most pressing concerns that the CTA has raised is the scale of unaudited carrier activity across Canada. Many trucking fleets operating in this country have never been subject to a provincial audit, and no federal oversight program currently exists to fill that gap. The CTA has described these un-inspected operators as “ghost fleets:” carriers moving freely through the transportation network without any regulatory accountability.
The association cautions that the convenience store industry receives multiple deliveries per week, and that the odds that at least some of those trucks are likely coming from carriers operating in this grey zone.
The CTA reports that Driver Inc. schemes drain more than $5 billion annually from federal tax and benefit revenues. For c-store operators, the knock-on effect is eroding road and highway infrastructure. Underfunded road maintenance, inadequate enforcement capacity, and gaps in inter-provincial data sharing all contribute to a freight environment that is slower, less predictable and increasingly unsafe. Deliver delays and damaged goods in transit are symptoms that operators feel at the store level, even when the root cause is happening far upstream.
What worker exploitation means for delivery and reliability
For industries that depend on high-frequency, time-sensitive delivery schedules such as fuel replenishment, packaged foods and a convenience supply chains among them, the presence of unvetted carriers in the freight ecosystem introduces risk that is difficult to quantify but easy to feel when something goes wrong.
High turnover, compromised worker safety, and a driver workforce under financial and legal duress creates the kind of supply chain fragility that shows up as missed delivery windows, staffing gaps at carriers and unpredictable service levels.
Labour instability as a supply chain variable
The human dimension of the Driver Inc. problem also carries operational implications. The CTA has identified widespread labour exploitation within non-compliant carrier operations. The CTA reports that drivers are often exploited themselves: Vulnerable workers who are often newcomers to Canada are being paid as little as a third of standard market wages with immigration fraud and labour exploitation described by the CTA as “pervasive within parts of the industry.”
CTA asking for federal action
Budget 2025 included a $77 million federal commitment to address tax noncompliance in trucking, alongside a policy change requiring Driver Inc. operators to file taxes using mandatory T4As. The CTA has acknowledged this as a meaningful first step. However the alliance is pressing hard for the government to match its stated commitment with active enforcement infrastructure: Audits, penalties and a national data-sharing framework between provinces that would give regulators a real time picture of carrier compliance.
For c-store operators and retail fuel vendors who contract with carriers directly or receive goods through distributors, a more regulated trucking environment means more dependable supply chains, predictable scheduling, and the assurance that the trucks serving your business meet baseline safety and legal standards.
What the CTA asks from C-store and forecourt operators
The CTA encourages business owners and members of the public to engage directly with their MP to demand sustained enforcement against Driver Inc. carriers and stronger federal investment in provincial road safety oversight.
The campaign also provides resources for drivers who have been pressured into misclassification arrangements, often at significant personal financial cost. "There is a contingent of the trucking industry that opposes much-needed oversight and wants to maintain the status quo. That position is clearly at odds with a growing number of concerned Canadians who demand Ottawa act in restoring law and order to our industry. We must ensure their voices are heard by all MPs and the government expands on its commitments made in Budget 2025,” Laskowski states.