Canada Amends Hours-of-Service Rules on Driver Repositioning and ELD Certification

In November 2020, the federal government made a set of housekeeping amendments to Canada's Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations. The changes were registered on November 3, 2020, as SOR/2020-240 and published in the Canada Gazette, Part II, on November 25, 2020. Most of them took effect on registration.

Transport Canada described all of the changes as non-substantive. According to the regulatory impact analysis, they imposed no new costs on carriers, drivers or ELD providers. Still, one of them affected how drivers log time spent travelling to pick up a truck.

Driver repositioning by any mode

The most practical change concerned section 10, which deals with drivers sent by their carrier to another location to start driving.

Before the amendment, time spent travelling as a passenger could be logged as off-duty time only if the driver travelled in a commercial vehicle. Under the new wording, time a driver spends travelling as a passenger at the carrier's request, by any mode of transportation, counts as off-duty time, provided the driver takes 8 consecutive hours off duty before starting to drive.

Transport Canada said the old wording did not match National Safety Code Standard 9, the hours-of-service standard the provinces and territories enforce, which already allowed repositioning by ferry, rail, transit, car or air. Provincial enforcement officials had flagged the mismatch. The department said the change created no new requirements for drivers and better reflected how the industry already operated.

ELD-related clean-up

Several changes tied back to the electronic logging device (ELD) amendments made in June 2019:

• Technical standard fixes. The 2019 rules contained interpretation provisions, subsections 1.1(2) to (4), that patched errors in the ELD technical standard published by the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators (CCMTA), such as incorrect references and UTC time zone offset values. CCMTA had since corrected the standard, so those subsections were repealed.
• Certification bodies. At the request of the Standards Council of Canada, paragraph 79(c) was reworded. Bodies seeking accreditation to certify ELDs had to show the validity of their testing methodology and its results, rather than their "certification" methodology. Transport Canada said certification comes only after testing is passed, and the change added no new requirements for certification bodies.

Other corrections

The package also:

• fixed a cross-reference in paragraph 91(3)(e), which pointed to a section 40 that had already been repealed;
• aligned the French and English versions of several provisions in section 91 that set out when a driver can be placed out of service.

One of those French-language fixes amended a provision on ELD tampering that was not yet in force. That fix was set to take effect on June 12, 2021, the date the ELD requirements were scheduled to begin.