Insurance premiums are going up, and when I say up, I don’t mean by just the rate of inflation. Oh no! Not just two or three percent. No No No. I see rates going up in some cases by one hundred percent! I’m seeing trucking insurance rates doubling in many cases and I see more…

Available soon for OTA Members to train from within their organization (May 3, 2017) — The “Essential Driving Skills; Tractor-Trailer Driver” curriculum package is now complete and approved by the Ministry of Transportation (MTO). The materials are now in production and will be available shortly as an off-the-shelf program to OTA member fleets wishing to…

This is the time of the year when taxes are paid. Most people are still feeling the sting. Not all operators wait till the end of the year to pay. Some make installment payments or remittances during the year (voluntary or mandatory). However, all good operators evaluate their tax liability for their prior year. It’s…

Over The Road May Issue now online!

How many times have you been stuck trying to make a specific task or project perfect and then got completely frustrated to the point of quitting when, in fact, you had probably nailed the task some time ago? My partner Jimmy Papineau and I have been working for just under a year on a retention…

Recently a trucking company client told me a story. Their Safety Director received a telephone call from a man who stated that he was currently in the hospital. He told the Safety Director that he had been rear-ended by one of his trucks and he claimed that the truck driver simply took off after the…

What makes a word relate better to a male or a female? According to Kat Matfield, who created a gender decoder for job ads (http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com), “we all use language that is subtly “gender-coded” and this affects job advertising as well. Matfield based her web-based tool on a study by professors from the University of Waterloo…

Traveling coast to coast can produce a problem for understanding income taxes in Canada. Many drivers have friends and acquaintances that live and work sometimes thousands of miles away. When the topic of income taxes comes up there can be significant differences in perception and therefore results. Canada is a big country, over three thousand…