Pass rates for drivers seeking a licence to operate a tractor-trailer are being kept secret by the ministry responsible for all DriveTest centres in Ontario.
The Toronto Star asked the province’s Ministry of Transportation for pass rates, broken down by test centre, of candidates seeking their AZ licence during the past five years, but was told that the Star would have to pay $2,000 for the information because a computer programmer would have to “write new code to extract the data from the ministry’s licensing and control system database.”
However, the ministry had stated back in September that pass rates by driver examiner and DriveTest centre are tracked in monthly reports from Serco, the private company that administers driver exams in Ontario on behalf of the government.
The ministry previously provided the Toronto Star with overall provincial pass/fail statistics for the road test portion of the AZ licensing exam. Those rates steadily increased from 81 per cent to 85 per cent between 2011 and 2013. The rates were not broken down by individual DriveTest centre.
The request for information is a follow-up to a Toronto Star article back in October, which revealed that trucker ‘licensing mills’ could be turning out as many as 15 per cent of the new drivers on the road – schools that may not be providing the same level of training as regulated schools.
“You’ve got unregulated schools that are bringing people in, doing the minimum that they have to do, and pushing them out the back door,” Norm McIntyre, senior vice president with Jardine Lloyd Thompson Canada Inc., in Toronto, Ont., told Insurance Business. “I know the (trucking) industry is understaffed by 24 per cent, and I would say the ‘mills’ are running out 15 per cent. The whole industry could be in a really bad situation in the next four to five years.”
In a letter to the Star requesting the $2,000 fee, the ministry said it would have to spend 15 hours on “database unload,” seven hours on “data filtering and download reformat,” four hours on “database table definition and mapping,” four hours on “SQL Loader Scripts preparation,” one hour on “analysis, coding and testing of extract program,” and two hours on “data extraction and verification.”
The letter was signed by Janet Dadufalza, manager of the MTO’s freedom of information and privacy office. (continued.)
#pb#
“This is ridiculous,” Kim Richardson, owner of KRTS Transportation Specialists, a Caledonia-based truck training school and a co-founder of the Truck Training Schools Association of Ontario, told the newspaper. “Why is the Ministry of Transportation withholding information? This is valuable information to help fix a problem that’s affecting the road users of Ontario.”
The investigation is a follow-up of a story the Toronto Star ran four years ago, reporting that pass rates for drivers seeking their G-class licences, required to drive a car or van, varied substantially between DriveTest location.
In that story, the pass rate in Brampton was about 50 per cent, while those taking their tests in Kenora passed more than 80 per cent of the time.
Trucking industry insiders say drivers seeking their AZ licence are experiencing the same trend, with test centres located in rural areas having higher pass rates than those in major cities.
