Truckers Tikka Masala, Part 2 - The Continuing Worldwide Highway Boogaloo
An update from a piece I wrote in 2024; 2025 has shown the problem to be so much worse, and unless action is taken now in 2026, it will get worse still.
In December of 2024, I released a piece called ‘Truckers Tikka Masala’, an inquiry into the many problems associated with the very high number of migrant ‘truckers’ on North American roads, with an examination of the how and why they arrived here and parasitized the trucking industry so heavily. Though this piece has become the highest performing Substack I have ever written, it barely scratched the surface of an immense iceberg, and incidents throughout 2025 have revealed just how massive this Iceberg is - and how close the Trucktanic is to hitting it and sinking. During the writing of my book, “End of The Road - Inside The War on Truckers”, I was sending so much intel to my editor on the history of how we got here, and reading article after article about all of the crashes and carnage that have taken place in recent times, that he exclaimed that I could ‘write an encyclopedia’ on trucking, not just a book.
Books can only be so long, and so much has happened and come to my attention during and after writing it, that I feel compelled to offer more to my readers here. The deep and profoundly corrupt penetration into the North American Trucking market by outside actors is worthy of a book on its own. When placed in context with what is happening in other parts of the Anglosphere, with mass emigration out of India encouraged by Narendra Modi and his loathesome government, truckers ought to be alerted to how their own governments and media are co-operating with this madness, and actively encouraging those truckers replacement.
2025 was an extremely dangerous year on North American highways, with many thousands of innocent motorists losing their lives in horrific yet totally preventable incidents. Though America and Canada have always had a yearly toll from traffic collisions, those revealed to be behind so many of these incidents in the past year have brought the increase of that toll into question. Some of these incidents have become very high profile, with attention to one particular incident taking over the news cycle for a solid two weeks.
The trucking industry never gets this level of attention in the mainstream media.
Back in August, a Mr Harjinder Singh, who entered the United States illegally in 2018, pulled the rig he was driving across the Florida turnpike while executing a prohibited U-turn, and in so doing ended the lives of three innocent motorists. We’ve all seen the video and heard about the aftermath, which included an awful lot of political mudslinging between various states, Red and Blue, and the Feds, about who was responsible for letting him in the country and giving him a CDL. Lost in the shuffle at the time, and by those with narrow attention spans right now, is that Mr Singh is but one example of a massive problem within not only the North American trucking industry, but around the world. Despite all of the sturm and drang and announcements from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the problem continues, with recent high profile deadly crashes involving ‘drivers’ of the same extraction as Mr Singh, which include the needless deaths of a honeymooning couple in Oregon and 3 people stopped in traffic on a freeway in California. All gentlemen from India, and all having entered the country illegally, and then granted work authorization and CDLs with minimal to no training or any background checks.
Those of my readers in Canada will be well aware of the problem with this particular group and their representation in crashes, and it appears that at least one mainstream media is finally paying attention. Back in October, National Post reporter Jamie Sarkonak wrote quite a lengthy piece documenting the problem with ‘The Lions’, which is what the appellation ‘Singh’ oft refer to. Her piece starts off with that horrific crash in Florida, and then she asks the questions many in Canadian media haven’t bothered asking, even in the wake of the Humboldt Tragedy.
But completely foreign to me was prompt action taken by American officials in response to the senseless deaths: driver Harjinder Singh was immediately charged with three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of manslaughter, and one week later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio halted the issuance of all work visas for commercial truckers, acknowledging the increasing safety risk they posed.
And that was just the latest safety measure the U.S. has taken with commercial trucking: in April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order bolstering the sector’s English-language requirements. English proficiency had always been required, but not enforced; now, drivers who can’t understand English are supposed to be placed out of service. Trump’s transportation department says it will pull funding from states that don’t comply.
See problem, fix problem. That’s the government’s job. And yet, in Canada, when we were confronted with a national tragedy caused by a non-citizen trucker back in 2018 — the deaths of 16 members of the Humboldt Broncos Junior A hockey team, killed when Jaskirat Singh Sidhu (who continues to fight his deportation) drove his semi-truck through a Saskatchewan highway stop sign at 100 km/h after ignoring its multiple preceding road signs and flashing light — our officials sure haven’t done much.
We will get back to why Canadian officials, either Federal of Provincial, haven’t done much.
Before describing a lengthy list of deadly incidents involving the Punjabis on Canadian roads, Sarkonak tells us -
There were training improvements: the Broncos tragedy inspired a number of jurisdictions to introduce MELT (Mandatory Entry Level Training) into their licensing regimes, which require drivers to complete more than 100 hours of instruction. Sidhu had completed only one week of training and two weeks of supervised driving. Saskatchewan would eventually make various safety upgrades to the intersection in question; in 2021, it would also ban all non-resident drivers in the province from driving on out-of-country licences (absent reciprocity agreements). Different provinces would make adjustments around the edges, but the crashes keep on happening. Humboldt wasn’t an anomaly; it was one iteration in a sequence of many other road disasters and just-about tragedies involving drivers that appear to be from abroad.
Every single truck driving school operator and company owner I’ve spoken with in Canada refers to MELT as a joke, and like the TFW (Temporary Foreign Worker) program and the LMIA (Labor Market Impact Assessments) required to obtain such TFW permits, the MELT program is rife with corruption and lack of enforcement of these minimum training standards.
If you would like to hear two interviews I have made with the operators of such truck driving schools, at least those reputable that aren’t run by scammers in a clear ethnic nepotism operation devoid of any substantial training -
And then there is the testing and licensing corruption.
Last year, we saw a pretty lame bit on some of the Brampton based truck driving schools from the CBC, which didn’t name names and didn’t get much of anything approaching hard answers or commitments out of the government. Despite the accents of everyone the CBC spoke with in the piece, not once did they mention the primary culprits; because of course they didn’t, as is practice in other media as well, including this report on a fraudulent license ring recently busted in Ontario.
CP24 didn’t include the names, but they are public information, so here they are for your consideration -
- Jaspal Benipal, 58, of Brampton, is charged with two counts, including secret commissions and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.
- Harmandeep Sudan, 40, of Brampton, faces two charges: secret commissions and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.
- Navdeep Grewal, 36, of Brampton, is charged with three offences: secret commissions, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.
- Vishnu Ayyamperumal Kumar, 36, of Oshawa, faces three charges including: secret commissions, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, and breach of trust.
- Victor Imade, 55, of Georgetown, is charged with three counts: secret commissions, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, and breach of trust.
- Imraan Jaffer, 43, of North York, faces three charges, including: secret commissions, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, and breach of trust.
- Craig Berry, 54, of Kingston, is charged with four offenses: secret commissions, money laundering, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, and breach of trust.
- Mandeep Manshahia, 34, of Caledon, faces four charges, including: secret commissions, money laundering, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, and breach of trust.
The dodgy CDL Mills which produce truck licenses in the United States are now the subject of investigations by US DOT under direction from Secretary Duffy, and a substantial number of these operations have been shut down already.
Jamie Sarkonak used a great phrase in her piece to describe the actions taken by Federal Regulators in the United States -
”See problem, fix problem.”
Canadians and Americans aren’t the only people seeing a problem, and the Americans aren’t the only government attempting to fix it, thank God.
Our friends from the Punjab have been racking up the same record of carnage and destruction on highways in the lands Down Under. The problem is the same in both Australia and New Zealand; the Kiwis appear to have found their system being scammed from afar, and the Australians are now slowly making state level changes to address the carnage on their roads.
https://www.noticer.news/perth-indian-truck-driver-dead-crash/
Local Indian media reported that Mr Singh was from Ram Khara Village in Tarn Taran, Punjab, and had come to Australia to study.
In the 2019 Globe and Mail investigation I referenced in part one of this series, and in discussions I have had with Canadian truck driving school operators, it is reported that many of the young Indian men emigrating to other countries initially do so as students, and then find themselves going truck driving instead, most likely having never driven anything before they left home. It appears that this pattern is repeating in Australia.
https://www.noticer.news/indian-truck-driver-killed-victoria-wangaratta-crash/
https://www.noticer.news/indian-truck-driver-careless-victoria-crash/
Davinder Singh Brar, who was working for transport giant Linfox at the time of the crash, faced Hamilton Magistrates Court last week where he pleaded guilty to careless driving while being assisted by a Punjabi interpreter.
Brar told the court he had been driving for 16 years and travelled 3 or 4 million kilometres without losing a demerit point or being in an accident before the June 18 incident on the Penshurst-Warrnambool Road, The Standard reported.
16 years in Australia and didn’t bother to learn English, eh?
https://www.noticer.news/adelaide-jagmeet-singh-avoids-jail-killing-pedestrian/
This is not the same Jagmeet Singh as the former leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, who propped up Trudeau for over two years after his disastrous handling of Covid and the Freedom Convoy. Perhaps the Canadian Jagmeet is more deserving of prison time than this unfortunate in Adelaide.
This last story is particularly egregious, as it involves the death of a well trained, competent and respected operator going about his business on his own turf, and he was killed by one of these invaders who had no business behind the wheel of a truck, much less being in Australia to begin with. And we see in this particular incident but one more example of a pattern being repeated around the world.
https://www.noticer.news/australia-overseas-truck-driver-licence-reform/
Delphine Mugridge started campaigning after her 77-year-old husband Neville “Slim” Mugridge died in a head-on collision on the Eyre Highway near Yatala in April, 2024. The other truck driver was named as Yadwindeer Singh Bhatti, 45, whose unidentified 25-year-old passenger from NSW was also killed.
Following the crash she called for reforms that were eventually adopted in South Australia and came into effect in February last year requiring drivers to undertake a Multi-Combination (MC) Licence Program to drive heavy vehicles, with overseas driving experience, except from New Zealand, no longer recognised.
In an ongoing petition that has been signed by more than 23,000 Australians, Ms Mugridge called for a series of timeframe changes she said would “ensure that overseas drivers can no longer enter Australia and obtain heavy vehicle licences” without years of experience driving lighter vehicles.
It appears South Australia is on to the scamming, as are their cousins over the Tasman in New Zealand, who have likewise discovered that our friends from India have an awfully hard time providing legitimate proof of driving experience from home or any other country they were in before entering New Zealand. India is the worldwide capital of various types of fraud and corruption, with entire economies of various Indian cities built on scamming people.
In November of 2025, it was reported that the New Zealand Transport Agency had revoked over 400 commercial drivers licenses that had been obtained using ‘false or altered documentation’.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/578428/nzta-discovers-440-fake-commercial-driver-licences
And it turns out that many of these guys trying to be truckers in New Zealand are claiming they themselves were defrauded by authorities in … Dubai?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/indonz/579636/warning-over-looming-driver-shortages-following-commercial-licence-revocations
Just like in Canada or America, whenever the government tries to clean up a mess it helped create by not enforcing nor maintaining a necessary barrier to entry into the trucking industry, various actors have to engage the ‘driver shortage’ trope.
Transport operators are warning of a looming driver shortage in the lead-up to Christmas after the NZ Transport Agency revoked hundreds of commercial licenses earlier this month.
NZTA revoked 440 commercial driving licenses after discovering false or altered documentation that converted overseas licences to New Zealand equivalents.
Employers of the drivers have warned that the crackdown could leave a lot of trucks sitting in warehouses instead of transporting goods at the busiest time of year.
I have been unable to find any articles in the Kiwi media describing how Christmas was cancelled or otherwise impeded by a shortage of truckers as of writing this article.
Almost like the economy keeps humming along in NZ, as it does here in the USA, despite the American Trucking Associations likewise bitching about a fake shortage of truckers since 1987.
Further in the article, we learn why NZTA revoked these licenses -
Sidhu said an audit by NZTA in July uncovered 440 commercial licenses that had been acquired through conversion appeared to be based on documents the agency now deemed invalid or non-verifiable.
Most affected licences were in heavy vehicle commercial categories, he said.
Sidhu said the document in question was a Dubai-issued supporting letter, commonly provided by companies in which drivers had worked, that had been accepted by NZTA for almost two decades as part of the licence-conversion process.
“I want to stress this is not a new document that was demanded after 2022,” Sidhu said.
Some drivers had also been scammed by a Dubai-based supporting letter provider, which he said had added to the confusion.
“The overseas provider openly advertised that they could supply the required supporting letter for a fee, suggesting this was the standard practice,” he said.
“Lured by the impression created that this was the official letter recognised by New Zealand authorities, many drivers paid him the money and got the letter. This letter is now deemed [to be] fraudulent by NZTA.”
Ranjit said many drivers had operated heavy vehicles exceeding 40 tonnes for many years in the UAE.
RNZ also asked NZTA for comment on the drivers’ claims the issue stemmed from system gaps in the application of policy in licence conversions.
“[The agency] is taking action on these licences following the discovery that false or altered documentation was provided during the process of converting these overseas licences to New Zealand heavy vehicle licences,” an NZTA spokesperson said in a statement.
“Irregularities in the documents provided during the conversion process were discovered during an audit undertaken by NZTA in July 2025. This action follows a thorough investigation of issues identified during the audit,” the spokesperson said.
As many of my readers will be aware, I too went trucking in New Zealand, and how I converted my license was by bringing documents with me from the Ontario Ministry of Transportation which showed that Ontario allowed far heavier trucks than seen on NZs public roads (though private forestry roads in New Zealand feature very heavy double trailer units that are heavier than anything in North America) and with this documentation, along with a letter from my employer declaring my experiences in Canada, I was allowed to take an NZ theory test and obtain a New Zealand Class 5 license, the highest class of commercial operating license in the country.
I think what’s going on with this story of these guys from India having their licenses revoked by NZTA is that they may or may not have ever driven back in India, and the licenses they were issued by the UAE may not have accounted for the types of truck and trailer or B train units operated on New Zealand’s roads, often exceeding 50,000 kgs. Though it is claimed that some of these guys ran heavier units in UAE, it appears that New Zealand could not confirm this, and rejected the documentation from UAE, which looks to have been organized by a less than reputable organization.
Given that India experiences some of the most horrific traffic fatality statistics in the world with more than 172,000 people dying on their roads per year and their road transport authorities remaining corrupt and unreliable despite over a decade of ‘reforms’ from Narendra Modi, maybe this is why the Kiwis are rightly reluctant to accept suspicious documentation about their driving experiences.
At a rally at a Sikh temple in Auckland, we hear similar complaints from this particular community as we hear in the United States and Canada with regards to government investigations into the legality of the outsized Punjabi presence in the trucking industry on both sides of the Pacific.
https://www.noticer.news/new-zealand-indian-truck-driver-licences-revoked/
Hundreds of the Indian drivers attended a rally at a Sikh temple in Auckland last weekend to protest the cancellations, claiming they were either treated unfairly or had been scammed after moving to New Zealand from the UAE to work after 2022 when the borders re-opened, RNZ reported.
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Indian transport operators also complained that they couldn’t find local hires to replace the disqualified drivers, and said the crackdown had affected thousands of people and could lead to supply shortages in the lead-up to Christmas.
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“These drivers can’t be replaced overnight. Firstly, getting commercial drivers is not easy in New Zealand. I advertised on TradeMe for one year but couldn’t find a single driver locally. That’s why we recruited from overseas. Secondly, training a new driver takes at least three months,”
Indeed, it is not easy to get a truck license in New Zealand, as they have a graduated truck licensing system which is meant to provide drivers with a legitimate amount of practice driving smaller trucks before moving on to larger trucks, a very sensible regime that ought be copied here in North America.
Something else they give away, which I highlighted, is that they couldn’t find local drivers.
Gee … I wonder why.
From a piece of apologia in the Seattle Times, we are regaled of the same sob story from an Indian trucking company operator in California.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/why-are-californias-indian-truck-drivers-disappearing-during-the-holiday-rush/
It is supposed to be the busiest time of year for the Roadies trucking company, but dozens of its trucks sit idle — unlikely casualties of a surprise scrutiny of laborers from India.
The Bakersfield, Calif., company has 200 big rigs but a dearth of drivers after authorities canceled thousands of commercial driver’s licenses in California, forcing more than 20 Roadies drivers out of the business and scaring others into quitting.
CEO Avninder Singh says he has doubled pay, but still can’t recruit enough drivers. He says he is now losing more each month than he usually makes in a year.
“My trucks are sitting” with no one to drive them, he said. “It has put my livelihood in danger.”
Outside of tech, medicine and family businesses, truck driving is one of the largest sources of employment for the Indian diaspora in America. Indian truckers say they are being unfairly targeted after a horrific accident triggered extra scrutiny of migrant drivers and tighter regulations.
If he doubled his pay and still can’t find drivers, his fellow Sikhs or otherwise, what was he originally paying them? What kind of operation is Roadies trucking? Maybe they are actively discriminating against American born truckers, a problem I documented here.
The Vigilantes of FreightX have some intel for us about Roadies -
https://x.com/maybedanielleee/status/1997672863692701704?s=20
Using the tools available at https://searchcarriers.com/ built by our colleague Garret Makes we find that Roadies maybe aren’t maintaining their trucks and trailers very well, over and above not being able to attract drivers after DOUBLING their pay scale.
Maybe Avninder Singh’s problem isn’t re-enforcement of the law brought to us by President Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy?
We hear yet another of these sob stories from an Indian owned and operated trucking company in California called Gillson Trucking, brought to us by a website called ‘Calmatters’, who perhaps erroneously identify themselves as ‘Nonprofit and Nonpartisan News’.
https://calmatters.org/economy/2026/01/immigrant-commercial-truck-licenses/
Around 35 of Gill’s immigrant drivers were notified since last fall that the Department of Motor Vehicles was canceling their commercial driver’s licenses. And, they were gone.
“We have lost nearly $2 million in the last four months while paying $200,000 monthly to the bank and insurers for 35 parked trucks. The banks don’t wait,” Gill said, who runs Gillson Trucking Inc.
His employees and his trucks are tied up in one of the flash points of the Trump administration’s broad crackdown on all kinds of immigration.
The company’s travails began in September when the Trump administration released an audit that questioned the legitimacy of about 17,000 California commercial drivers licenses held by immigrants, finding licenses with expiration dates that exceeded the drivers’ authorization to live and work in the U.S.
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Many Sikh Californians went into debt to immigrate to the United States and truck driving became a vital source of income for them.
We will get to that part about going into debt just to illegally migrate to America in a minute, but let’s have an assessment of Gillson Trucking from fellow FreightX commentator and trucking industry pro Rob Carpenter -
https://x.com/Thewhitesmoke/status/2017778641996808264
Gillson Trucking Inc has multiple civil lawsuits filed across states, including federal personal injury litigation stemming from crashes in Wyoming and Indiana
FMCSA records show multiple reportable crashes, including injury crashes
The carrier shows elevated out-of-service violations, driven largely by hours-of-service / log integrity failures and vehicle maintenance issues
THIS BUSINESS IS TIED OF OTHER BUSINESSES BY ADDRESS OWNER AND CONTACT INFO.
MCS 150 SAYS HE HAS 10 TRUCKS BUT HIS MEDIA QUOTE SAYS HE HAS 35.
HEY BUBBA DISPATCHING ACTUALLY HAS HIM ALSO TIED TO HIGHWAY 99 TRUCKING THROUGH THE SAME ACCOUNT.
Gillson Trucking is facing a pending insurance cancellation
Gillson Truck Driving School shares the same contact information as the carrier and That driving school is NOT listed in the FMCSA ELDT Training Provider Registry
California DMV action resulted in the carrier’s entire driver population being removed from the road.
Not sudden.
Not random.
NOT caused by “banks not waiting.”
When crash history, roadside violations, litigation exposure, insurance instability, and questionable training pipelines stack up, regulators intervene.
Enforcement isn’t the problem.
It’s the outcome.
Carriers don’t get shut down because of one issue. THESE ARE JUST A FEW POINTERS We could probably go all day on this carrier.
WHAT’S CRAZY IS IF YOU HAVE 35 TRUCKS JUST SITTING WHY NOT HIRE LEGAL DRIVERS TO DRIVE THEM THAT ARE AMERICAN?
And there are plenty of American truckers who Gillson or Roadies could have hired, if they paid them correctly, or weren’t themselves engaging in discrimination against indigenous born American white guys, or weren’t running unsafe operations that people would want to work for.
The apologia for really terribly operated Punjabi trucking companies now facing the music from the Trump Administration has even reached the vaunted pages of the New York Times, whose contributing writer couldn’t be bothered with the basic due diligence of checking publicly available databases on these shitty carriers, nor speak with industry pros like Rob or Danielle Chaffin of maybe danielle’s thoughts
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/sikhs-truckers-trump-crackdown.html
Over and above the usual whining about Trump, and failing to ask why these Sikh trucking companies usually don’t hire locals, or why they are so heavily represented in truck crash statistics, we get to an interesting tidbit about how so many of these Sikh truckers arrived in America -
He left Punjab in 2020, fearful he would be targeted by the Indian government. He supports creating a separate Sikh state, something the Indian government strongly opposes. He moved to London, where he worked in construction and improved his English.
In 2022, Mr. Singh flew to Mexico City, then made his way to the U.S. border. He crossed into Southern California and requested asylum, part of a huge influx of immigrants during the Biden administration.
I don’t know how one claims asylum after exiting the place where the problem is, and then working and traveling through a number of safe countries.
Next, we will examine just why it is that so many Punjabis are emigrating to the West, why they end up in the trucking industry, and, specifically to Canada, why the government is doing nothing about it.
In a very long and worthy read from Sam Bidwell, a senior fellow at the London based Adam Smith Institute, we are given some deep insights into why it is that so many Indians are leaving their own country and heading for jobs in the Middle East or in the wider Anglosphere.
Really, it was only a matter of time before mass Indian migration landed on Anglophone shores. Over the past few decades, India’s population has exploded, with nearly 400 million people added to the country’s population since the millennium. At the same time, its economy has shaken off the constraints of the ‘License Raj’, with Indian GDP per capita rising sharply since the country’s 1991 balance of payments crisis. As a result, many millions of Indians are now wealthy enough to emigrate - as many as 450 million Indians are now considered ‘middle class’. While poor Indians rarely have the means to emigrate, and very rich Indians have little need to, this vast and growing middle class is hungry for economic opportunity overseas.
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And the Indian Government has significant incentives to encourage emigration. In 2024, India was the world’s top recipient of international remittances, with $129 billion pouring into the country via the vast Indian diaspora. That’s a larger figure than many Indian states - the financial contributions of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) plays a significant role in the country’s economic development strategy. In February of this year, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced plans to raise the threshold at which tax is collected on remittances, a policy which will further incentivise NRIs to send more of their money home.
Mr. Bidwell’s piece offers a long and informative dive into the last hundred years of modern Indian politics, and specifically the Hindutva ideology which is claimed to undergird the thinking of Prime Minister Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, whom have very little time for Muslims or Sikhs. The long running animosity between Hindus and Sikhs has become a major problem in Canada, as they are the two dominant groups representing the heavy emigration of Indians to Canada; issues with this problem in India being brought to the Great White North go back quite far -
Whichever way you slice it, Indian immigration has hardly ushered in an economic boom for Canada. In fact, despite the fact that many Indians have used ‘highly skilled’ visa routes to reach the country, hard economic data shows that Indians are slight underperformers. These questionable economic benefits have also been accompanied by significant social and political downsides.
The most obvious example is Canada’s ongoing problem with Sikh nationalism - and the countervailing backlash from Hindu nationalists. According to the 2021 census, 36 percent of Canadian Indians are Sikh - a phenomenon which may have its roots in the fact that Canada’s earliest Indian immigrants were Sikh. Many Canadian Sikhs are supportive of the so-called ‘Khalistan movement’, a Sikh nationalist movement which advocates for an independent Sikh state, incorporating the Indian state of Punjab.
Between 1984 and 1995, supporters of an independent Khalistan led an armed campaign against the Indian government; the most notable episode in this campaign was ‘Operation Blue Star’, during which the Indian Army occupied the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism, in order to flush out Sikh militants who were hiding there.
The Khalistan campaign was supported by many Canadian Sikhs, who funded and supported Sikh nationalist organisations within India. On June 23, 1985, Sikh nationalists planted a bomb on Air India Flight 182, travelling between Montreal and Mumbai. The bomb killed all 329 occupants of the plane - this remains the deadliest terror attack in Canadian history. The mastermind behind the attack was believed to be Inderjit Singh Reyat, a dual British-Canadian national, and Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Canadian Sikh separatist leader. In many Canadian Sikh communities, Reyat and Parmar remain figures of veneration. The leader of Canada’s left-wing New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, has regularly attended events in the Sikh community where posters celebrating Parmar are prominently displayed.
We are still dealing with this intra-Indian conflict in Canada today, specifically with Khalistani separatists, who … already separated and moved to Canada? Why are they still engaging in political activity about a place they no longer live? The Last Journalist in Canada, Mocha Bezirgan, has been following this movement closely -
Even such an august publication as the Economist has approached this question, lest you think it is only being asked by think tank cranks or those of us pushed outside of the Overton Window of acceptable discourse.
Most Indians abroad have been highly successful. In 2023 they sent home nearly $125bn in remittances, equivalent to around 3.4% of India’s GDP, according to World Bank estimates. In America 80% of citizens of Indian origin have college degrees. The median Indian household income there is $150,000, twice America’s national average. People of Indian descent lead Google, the World Bank—and Britain.
One wonders how much wealth is being extracted from the North American trucking industry as part of remittance flows, and how much is repaying the debts to the various gangsters, agents, and human smugglers who brought these guys here in the first place.
There are still plenty of low- or semi-skilled Indian workers filling menial jobs the host countries’ natives will not or cannot do, especially in the Gulf states.
Oil Rich Emirates have so much money that most of their own citizens have become incredibly lazy; this laziness has eliminated their own working class to the point that they have to contract Indians to come and drive trucks for them. That’s fine for the UAE, but North America being so much bigger and the wealth spread out differently, workers here can’t afford the luxurious lifestyle afforded by an entire society subsidized by oil royalties; and, generally speaking, the average North American doesn’t look down on the working class, nor view it as a necessity that they be replaced with insourced labor. It’s a bummer our own ruling class are starting to think like the Arabs, whose countries were the last to officially outlaw slavery, which persisted legally until the 1960s though some would say that the practice is still in place across the Gulf States.
The real impact of the diaspora in politics is in funding, campaigning and spreading India’s influence. As overseas Indians have become more prominent in their host societies, many have begun to take more of an interest in politics both in their new countries and back home. So political parties, Indian and foreign, are wooing them more keenly.
Mr Modi and his BJP are acutely aware of this. Their election manifesto in 2014 called the diaspora “a vast reservoir to articulate the national interests and affairs globally” that would be “harnessed for strengthening Brand India”.
Though I doubt very highly that Punjabis in Canada are doing any canvassing for Mr Modi, their remittance contributions to India’s GDP, as well as being out of his hair over in Canada, are very useful opportunities for him to take advantage of.
As I have documented in the first part of this (thus far) two part series about (mostly) Punjabis and their penetration into Canadian trucking, and as Ms Sarkonak at the National Post, amongst others, has also begun to notice, we must return to her observation about ‘See problem, fix problem’ where it concerns the seeming lack of solving the problem in Canada, such that anyone in a position of power will even admit it as such.
A maddening sentencing handed down to one of these guys after he killed a woman in Bolton, Ontario, brings the ongoing and unsolved problem into sharp relief.
A Punjabi asylum seeker who killed a 23-year-old woman in a fatal truck accident was handed a mere 55-day jail sentence and a light fine by a Caledon court, sparking outrage from the victim’s loved ones and advocates.
Rajwinder Singh, 43, pleaded guilty on October 15, 2025, to killing Adrianna Milena McCauley in a fatal four-vehicle collision in Bolton, Ontario, on September 10, 2024. Singh drove into an intersection approximately 10 seconds after the traffic light had turned red.
The court could not provide a “definitive answer” as to what caused Singh to run the red light, noting that weather and visibility were “not factors” as the roads were dry and clear.
A local news outlet, the Caledon Enterprise, detailed the court decision, reporting that Justice of the Peace Marsha Farnand sentenced Singh to a 55-day custodial term, 24 months of probation, a three-year driving suspension and a $1,000 fine.
The court adjusted Singh’s fine due to his “financial instability” from losing his job. He was ordered to attend counselling and rehabilitation to address the “psychological toll” the incident had on him.
—
Singh’s defence lawyer, Bally Hundal, cited Singh’s status as an asylum seeker with a wife and two children and claimed the incident had an “enormous psychological toll” on Singh due to the “weight of the tragedy.” The local report noted Singh addressed the court through “a Punjabi translator” to apologize and ask for the family’s forgiveness.
An oft heard claim with these guys is that they are seeking ‘asylum’ which is a convenient way to blame the Hindu-Sikh cleavage in India as a reason for Canadians to accept yet another illiterate fuckwit on their roads who is at a high risk of killing innocent motorists. I don’t know anything about how Rajwinder arrived in Canada, but one wonders if his asylum claim is true or not, or is yet more bogus whining, given how so many of these guys pay smugglers to get them into America or Canada via Mexico, after their families leverage everything they have to send them here. I guess their families aren’t at risk from a Modi Pogrom by staying in the Punjab?
Speaking of the smugglers and the methods by which so many Punjabis show up in North America illegally, an Indian analyst who writes here on Substack published quite an interesting piece on the networks by which economic migrants from the Punjab find their way over here, and then claim asylum in a transparently obvious attempt to mask the fact that they are ECONOMIC MIGRANTS.
Like myself and Jamie Sarkonak and so many others, Ms Mirchandani starts her piece with a list of tragedies involving the gentleman faking their way into North America, and then describes how they got here.
Faced with high unemployment and deadend jobs, they find themselves hankering after the material success their compatriots have achieved in America, with fast cars flashed each day on social media. They sign up with so-called agents who promise a way into that dream for large sums of cash. They are forced to mortgage their farmland to afford it.
An underground network connects agents in cities across continents as they make their trek around the world. Each stop involves the production of fraudulent passports and visas. The passage from South America into Panama takes them on foot through the Panamanian rainforest, where, an agent says, “even the leaves can kill.”
In 2024 alone, 174 migrants are known to have lost their lives crossing the Darien Gap.
—The expansion of these human smuggling syndicates across India led to what eventually became a mini-exodus. Between the years 2016 and 2021, the documentary notes, nearly a million people left Punjab.
American scholars noticed a corresponding surge in Indian migrants encountered at the border. A recent paper by Devesh Kapur, professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University, says that in two years, the numbers of Indian migrants grew 15 times, from around 3,000 in 2021 to 43,000 in 2023.
Satnam Singh Chahal, director of the North American Punjabi Association (NAPA), explained in an interview that once the agents bring them to the border, migrants are on their own. Their English skills may be limited to a few words. They sink or swim based on their community networks within the U.S. Lawyers are procured to file asylum claims, and they usually find piecework with Indian-owned firms through familial contacts. As newcomers with little knowledge of U.S. labor laws, in massive debt back home, they are vulnerable to brutal exploitation.
A Documentary that Ms Mirchandani includes in her piece is well worth a watch -
This is probably a good place to remind my readers that not only are innocent North American motorists victims of this exploitation of economic migrants who ought have just stayed home, but those migrants themselves are being killed and maimed left and right by being put in trucks they have not been properly trained to operate in a country where many of them are functionally illiterate.
GoFundMe is awash in fundraising campaigns to help the families of these guys being killed by their own ineptitude behind the wheel.
Friend and fellow trucker advocate Justin Martin put it pretty succinctly on Twitter -
249 results on GoFundMe, and that’s only one name; perhaps we could search for other Indian appellations, or common names from other countries whose gangsters have also latched themselves onto the North American trucking industry like leeches from a swamp, but today we are focused on the Punjabis.
Another area where Punjabis benefit greatly from parasitizing the Canadian trucking industry is in the profits they derive from narco-trafficking; or conversely, like the 249 gentlemen alluded to above, find their lives truncated, if not from fatal or injurious crashes, from long jail sentences once busted as mules.
Like the name Singh popping up in so many truck crash incidents across the continent, it is also a name which appears in weekly police reports about various drug busts, usually at the border between Canada and the United States.
I wrote about the problem with Punjabi participation in trafficking narcotics here -
In that piece, I documented dozens of Indian migrants whose lives are now being wasted in American and Canadian prisons after being caught hauling various drugs, mostly northbound for the Canadian market.
After I wrote that piece, and spoke with a Canadian crime reporter based in BC, a question emerged - are these guys just being used as mules?
In the year since I wrote that, the issue of these guys and their narco-trafficking has only increased. At the Blue Water Bridge alone, 9 busts involving Punjabi drivers have taken place in 2025 and a google search for these incidents across the continent set for only 2025 produces thousands of results. Most involve recent arrivals from the Punjab hauling cocaine or meth into Canada, some are busted in the US, and then there are a number of these gentleman grabbed by American authorities as they attempt to distribute it throughout the United States.
A Canadian drug kingpin named Ryan Wedding was recently apprehended in Mexico and was described as “a modern-day El Chapo, he is a modern-day Pablo Escobar” for his many years of working with the Sinaloa Cartel. Was Weddings distribution network reliant on the same churn of new drivers as the rest of the trucking industry, except instead of quitting, the guys hauling his freight end up in prison? Why would Wedding care about the fate of some young guy from India, who showed up in the US or Canada along with so many other desperate cases who have been sold a bill of goods about trucking in North America? Local truckers in North America, wise to the very high possibility of inspection by border authorities, especially crossing from Mexico into the U.S., are probably not likely candidates to volunteer their services.
Let’s get back to Jamie Sarkonak’s statement about Canadian Officials who “haven’t done much” about the many years of highway tragedies on our roads and the ongoing high profile narco-trafficking.
Canadian investigative journalist Sam Cooper of The Bureau has found that Canadian officials aren’t very co-operative with American authorities in chasing down foreign directed drug trafficking networks in Canada, a problem that has been referenced by officials in the Trump Administration. I could go on a very long tangent here about the involvement of Chinese Triads, the CCP, and their connections to the likes of Mr Wedding and perhaps all of these Punjabi mules, as well as many other actors laundering their money through Canada in various ways, but that is the beat of Mr Cooper, whose Substack I highly recommend.
Canadians continue to be subject to a reign of terror on their roads, and even in the few weeks it has taken me to write this in the marginal time I get away from work and family, the crashes and dead bodies continue to pile up. In yet another needless tragedy, three more innocent residents of Northern Ontario were wiped out on Highway 11 on January 31; the same CBC reporter having informed us only days earlier that four other big truck collisions had occurred over the course of three days, also in Northern Ontario. A pattern that emerges from these pieces is actually sad to watch - calls for upgrades to the highway, increased training, and for a recently built inspection station near Thunder Bay to be open more often. The problem with the calls for extra training and upgrades to the highway is that it ignores all of us truckers who ran up that road for decades with a decidedly lower frequency of crashing and fatalities. How about asking professional and experienced drivers with decades of experience what their secret sauce is. No, that’s not on the table, of course; likewise, nowhere in any of the reporting on these regular and deadly incidents are questions about the ‘who’ allowed to be asked, nor do they consider the problem of chasing horses already let out of the barn.
Those whose responsibility it is to investigate and solve these problems, however, haven’t got very far, and there are a number of reasons for that, including the fact that various levels of the Canadian government, just like the trucking industry, are now represented by Punjabis. Also, those who are tasked with ‘advocating’ for the trucking industry are cowards afraid of speaking plainly and directly about what the problem really is.
In the most recent Canadian Federal election, where the Conservative Party managed to blow what was thought to be a done deal in seeing Justin Trudeau out the door, Trudeau’s Liberal Party of Canada, now lead by the Bankster and Globalist Ghoul Mark Carney, the Liberals eked out another minority government, though they are only a couple of seats away from a full majority. Minority governments have been a feature of Canadian politics for some time, and with only a small handful of seats being the difference between Power and Penury, various minority constituencies are often courted, including the Punjabi population in Canada.
The Punjabi diaspora in Canada is substantial; at the 2021 Canadian census, they numbered 950,000 people. Though this only represents a little under 3% of the total population, due to how seats in Parliament are allocated, and the concentration of Punjabis in their own ethnic enclaves such as Brampton and Surrey, they have an outsized influence in politics, holding 22 seats in Canada’s Parliament. This doesn’t sound like much considering that there are 343 seats, but when a couple of seats buy you protection from a Non-Confidence Motion, every one of those seats counts.
Justin Trudeau, who is now jetting around the world with pop star Katy Perry while injecting green house gas emissions directly into the upper atmosphere, understood very well the power of the Punjabi presence in Parliament. In 2018, an intelligence assessment was delivered to Parliament which positioned Khalistani extremists as one of Canada’s top five terror threats. Punjabi MPs immediately objected and made numerous vacuous and self serving statements; the report was watered down, and Trudeau, amongst other Canadian political leaders, went on to make amends to this offended minority with appearances at various Punjabi community shindigs. The Washington Post noticed this, given that international terrorism is a major concern of the American Security State, and in a piece describing all of this pandering and nonsense, rightly pointed out why it is that such a small minority in Canada has such disproportionate influence -
The real reason Canada’s political parties are forced to politely tolerate such nonsense is that they insist on appointing their parliamentary candidates through a ludicrously undemocratic pay-to-play nomination system that allows small, well-organized special-interest groups to gain influence completely disproportionate to their size.
Nominees for the House of Commons continue to be selected in small, secretive meetings attended by a couple of hundred individuals who have paid for the privilege. Such a process is easily corrupted, and frequently taken over by narrow religious, ethnic or ideological groups …
It is a testament to the political savvy of Canada’s small Sikh community that today nearly 5 percent of the Canadian parliament is Sikh, as are 12 percent of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers. Trudeau will even face down a Sikh opponent for the prime ministership in October — New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh.
Since this piece was published in 2019, we have, thank God Guru Nanak, seen the end of Jagmeet Singh’s presence in Parliament, though his co-ethnics have increased theirs.
As mentioned previously, and in part one of this series, Punjabis have made major inroads into the Canadian trucking business, and have been found to brag about their penetration into the business within their own media, even if they don’t have too much to say about the indentured servitude which undergirds some of their businesses, or the high frequency of crashes they are involved in.
Many others are noticing the crashes, and it appears that the only audience they are getting at the Federal level about this growing problem is because of a tax avoidance scam that is now such a feature of the Canadian trucking industry that Parliament has been holding ongoing committee meetings about it for the past few months. That scam, called ‘Driver Inc’ by the Canadian Trucking Alliance, is a subcontracting model where employee drivers who do not own the truck they are driving are treated as independent businesses, rather than employees. The CTA claim that this scam is costing the government $5.2 billion dollars a year in various streams of tax revenue, and avoidance of employer contributions to various programs such as unemployment insurance and the Canada Pension Plan. They also rightly point out that those operators using this arrangement have a pricing advantage over the established carriers comprising CTA’s membership, and that pricing advantage has got to the point that those carriers cannot compete.
What the CTA will not tell you is that the primary culprits in this scheme are the Punjabis, something which has to be inferred from media pieces on the scheme, and the fact that tax avoidance is an animating feature of doing business in most of the rest of the world, a proclivity that the recent arrivals do not immediately abandon, especially upon relocating to a high tax country like Canada.
As I mentioned in a piece here on Substack last year discussing ‘Driver Inc’
In the CBC piece, they never tell you who it is that engages in Driver Inc; but if you read between the lines, it is pretty obvious.
Speaking with a Mr Karanveer Singh, we are told how he came to Canada as a student, and later got into trucking. Maybe Mr Singh obtained his license through one of the fraudulent truck driving schools run by his fellow Punjabis, which are a rampant problem in Canada, so much so that the CBC felt compelled to finally say something about it last year. He eventually found himself as a ‘self employed’ driver in one of these dodgy Driver Inc arrangements, and was defrauded of a large sum of his pay.
Funny how they don’t name the companies, nor what size they are, nor where they are located, nor whom they are run by. The same thing happens in the documentary on the truck driver ‘schools’ where the CBC again never tells you who, but it can be inferred from the spoken accents of everyone involved.
The Parliamentary committees investigating the ‘Driver Inc’ model are called the “Changing Landscape of Truck Drivers in Canada” and are held by TRAN, the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. I’d say landscape is a bit disingenuous, as the change being observed is ethnic, economic, and cultural in nature. Although, the landscape is also changed, if only temporarily, when a truck crashes, burns down to the frame rails, and leaves a hell of a scar on the pavement, or in the ditch adjacent.
You can have a look at videos of every one of their meetings back to the beginning in October right here.
One of the videos pulled from TRAN was highlighted to great effect by the guys at Wiretap Media and shows us where the Driver Inc scam collides with our friends from the Punjab and the devastating effect this has on Canadian (and American) families.
https://x.com/WiretapMediaCa/status/2016310719189233905
In the heart of Canada’s trucking industry, a story of profound loss has ignited a powerful movement for change. Mélanie Séguin, a grieving stepmother and grandmother from Quebec, has transformed her personal tragedy into a national crusade against systemic failures in road safety, exploitative labour practices, and corporate negligence. At the center of her fight is The Harman Group (also known as HGC The Harman Group or Harman Transport), an Ontario-based carrier whose operations have been marred by fatal accidents, scandals, and allegations of involvement in the controversial “Driver Inc.” model.
—On July 19, 2022, a routine drive on Highway 30 in Brossard, Quebec, turned catastrophic when a semi-truck plowed into a line of vehicles stopped in a construction zone. The collision claimed the lives of Nancy Lefrançois, 42, and her 11-year-old son Loïc, Séguin’s stepdaughter and grandson. Two other family members sustained serious injuries, leaving the survivors with lasting physical and emotional scars. Séguin has described the event as one that “destroyed our family” and “scattered us,” emphasizing the preventable nature of the incident.
—
The driver, Baljeet Singh, then 25, was behind the wheel of a Harman Group truck. Dashcam footage later revealed he was distracted by his cellphone, failing to brake as he approached the zone at high speed. After the crash, Singh reportedly fainted, received medical treatment, and was questioned by Quebec provincial police. Shockingly, he fled Canada less than 24 hours later, travelling to the United States and then to India. For three years, he evaded justice, prompting outrage over lax border controls and post-accident protocols. Singh was finally arrested by U.S. Marshals on August 21, 2025, following extradition proceedings, and returned to Canada on September 10, 2025. He now faces charges of dangerous driving causing death and dangerous driving causing bodily harm in a Longueuil court.
—
Founded in 1994 by Jas Shoker, Harman Transport began as a single-truck operation and grew into a family-run cold chain logistics company based in Caledon, Ontario, with expansions into Quebec and cross-border services. Shoker, who emigrated from Punjab, India, started his career in Canada after arriving in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
—
The company operates in Brampton and Caledon, areas with large South Asian communities, particularly Punjabi Sikhs. Industry observers note that Harman, like many Ontario carriers, predominantly hires drivers and staff from this demographic, drawing from immigrant networks in Punjab and other parts of India. This practice is common in Canada’s trucking sector, where South Asian workers make up a significant portion of the workforce, often entering via temporary foreign worker programs.
—
Fraud allegations center on potential use of the Driver Inc. model, where drivers are falsely incorporated to evade taxes and benefits—a practice the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) is cracking down on with $77 million in funding from the 2025 federal budget. Social media and industry forums claim Harman owes hundreds of thousands in unpaid wages to around 40 drivers, amid whispers of bankruptcy, though no official filings confirm this. Séguin has “uncovered” these through her research, tying them to broader exploitation of immigrant workers, many from South Asia, who face rigged license tests, bribes, and abusive contracts.
The whole thing is worth a read, and kudos to Wiretap Media for staying on top of this issue, and for sitting through hours of this committee’s testimony.
Notably, there appears to be no Punjabi members of Parliament on this committee, which is strange, given that they now have a reasonable claim to operating over 50% of various freight markets in the country. That said, perhaps this lends something to my perception that the government is more worried about the tax avoidance than the collisions, and thus the committee looks like the board of executives of a bank. At some point in this series of meetings, The Liberals got up and left right before victims such as Mélanie Séguin could testify.
Or maybe I’m being a bit cynical about this, as it is very difficult to continually hear about these stories and see with our own eyes who the culprits are … and then watch the government do what the government does. Which is nothing.
Just this past week, we have news of one of these ‘drivers’ pleading guilty to another horrific and completely unnecessary crash back in 2023.
https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2026/02/10/ont-man-pleads-guilty-in-2023-transport-truck-crash-that-killed-olympian-alexandra-paul/
The guilty plea came two-and-a-half years after provincial police said Sidhu, while behind the wheel of a speeding transport truck in a construction zone along County Road 124, crashed into the back of several stopped vehicles, including a Cadillac driven by Paul, who had her 10-month-old son in the backseat at the time of the pileup.
—
According to investigators, Sidhu entered the construction zone, north of Shelburne, at about 3 p.m. on Aug. 22, 2023, travelling nearly double the posted 60 kilometre an hour reduced speed limit before slamming into a lineup of six vehicles, hitting Paul first. The Crown said Sidhu ignored posted signs and warnings to slow down with the construction zone ahead.
—
The Crown revealed Sidhu had been working for 26 hours at the time of the crash, and his vehicle was recorded travelling between 102 and the truck’s maximum 108 km/h speed.
Alexandra Paul was a decorated figure skating star at the Mariposa School of Skating in Barrie, with her ice dance partner and husband Mitch Islam. The pair represented Barrie and Canada in ice dance at the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.
Another innocent life sniffed out, extinguished on the altar of greed which animates those forces who are trying to turn the world into a mass of human resources slurry.
Getting back to our question of Punjabi representation in the Canadian government, and what we can, or cannot, expect out of that government in dealing with the problem, we must consider that in addition to the naked parasitism on the trucking industry which these guys are engaged in, it seems unlikely that they will admit the problem being centered amongst their own ‘community.’
There is an institution within Punjabi culture called ‘Izzat’, which loosely translated means ‘honor’ or ‘dignity.’ Usually, it is only ever discussed insofar as it affects women subject to violence in the barbaric defense of that ‘honor’ but it can also describe prestige and social standing within communities. And, it can also describe the behaviors of communities in how they shield themselves from criticism or accountability when acting in ways that are at odds with everyone else.
A few months ago, a long description of how ‘Izzat’ works, at the level of entire groups of people, was posted to the forum board KiwiFarms. Given controversy in the United States over the issue of H1B visas and the correct perception that tech jobs are being given to Indians on the cheap instead of to American jobseekers, this post went super viral, including on Twitter, where it has racked up over 6 million views.
The whole thing is worth a read.
Some excerpts -
Izzat has no direct translation into English. We only have terms that can broach the same concept such as 'honour' or 'reputation' or 'face'. Izzat is so much more than that. It's a zero-sum game of collective honour shared by whole groups of people, all of whom take it very, very seriously. A system like this isn't just foreign to Enlightenment values, but I'd argue it's antithetical to every sensible form of governance on the planet. It will destroy any system that assumes good faith.
Izzat conflicts are not about who is right and who is wrong. It's about who wins and who loses. This means it's a zero-sum game where just about any action is justified … to restore the lost Izzat. Izzat is a limited social currency and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else. Winning is righteous in Izzat. Losing is unrighteous … The only morality in Izzat is the protection of your group's collective ego.
—
With two Indians in an argument, the stakes are always deadly thanks to Izzat. Neither of them can back down, nor can they admit fault. Admitting fault is seen as deliberately humiliating yourself. Not only that, but because Izzat is shared, you are shaming everyone who shares your Izzat. So, admitting fault or taking responsibility for a problem is a form of social suicide.
—
Let's say someone in India complains about a broken water pipe. Instead of the problem being addressed, the official responsible for the water pipe denies it's a problem and counterattacks him instead, because daring to question his efficacy in his role was challenging his Izzat. So the official destroys the person who brought the problem up. The water pipe never gets fixed.
—
It's not uncommon to see Indians gloat about their success in the west. And yes, izzat is very much a system that enables short term success. But the fundamental reality is the prosperity that these Indians find so attractive in the first place wouldn't exist if the west practiced something similar to Izzat. Our systems can only exist on the assumption of good faith, and not a majority of people exploiting them for destructive short term gain. On top of that, if an Indian causes the systems and companies he comes into contact with to collapse, then he can just go back to India with his plunder. He has no stakes in the long-term prosperity, functionality or stability of these systems. The stakes are completely asymmetrical in the Indian's favour.
—
The western idea of merit is competence in a role. Merit in Izzat is determined by what lengths you will go to to achieve a goal, with competence merely being one path. It often becomes a secondary path, as printing a degree that says you're qualified to be a jet pilot is just as good as being able to actually fly a jet in the eyes of Izzat. In other words, Izzat selects for appearance over authentic merit or morality.
Printing a degree and competency being negotiable sounds a little familiar, almost like the modus operandi of so many CDL mills which issue a fake credential for these guys to get behind the wheel, with the rest of this system now being shielded from legitimate accountability because of the political necessity of votes.
The problem with Punjabi truckers in Canada is not new, and it has been reported on at length not only amongst citizen journalists like myself or the guys at The Noticer or Wiretap, but at such respected publications as The Globe and Mail, long before Jamie Sarkonak’s piece in the National Post. But has anyone asked if people from a culture where something like Izzat features prominently will do anything to police their own group, especially when that group are so heavily involved in a highly contentious issue where the honor of that group might come into question?
Meet the Transportation Minister for the Province of Ontario, Prabmeet Sarkaria.
Mr Sarkaria, as head of the Transportation Ministry, could be reasonably expected, in a functioning democracy, maybe not the kleptocratic authoritarian shithole Canada has become, but in a functioning democracy, to have some kind of emergency action plan to deal with all of the death and destruction that takes place on the provinces highways. Maybe a call for a graduated truck driver licensing system, maybe a review of all of the dodgy trucking companies implicated by ‘Driver Inc’, or maybe working with other provincial leaders like Transport Minister Devin Dreeshen of Alberta, who is cracking down on the license mills in his province and working towards recognizing trucking as a trade.
A program initiated across Canada in response to the Humboldt Tragedy is called MELT, or Mandatory Entry Level Training for truckers. Though not a graduated licensing system as one functions in Australia or New Zealand, and as mentioned previously, considered something of a joke by industry insiders, MELT is at least an attempt to address the problem of so many incompetent and dangerous truckers on our roads.
And what do you know, Minister Sarkaria is a little behind on implementation.
From the Canadian industry website Truck News -
https://www.trucknews.com/human-resources/truck-driver-training-schools-slam-ontarios-melt-lesson-plan-deadline-extension/1003201895/
Truck driver training schools and industry organizations are pushing back hard against the Ontario Ministry of Transportation’s (MTO) decision to once again extend the deadline for lesson plan compliance in the mandatory entry-level training (MELT) program.
The ministry announced schools now have until July 1, 2026, to submit detailed lesson plans, a move that has sparked widespread frustration.
The Truck Training Schools Association of Ontario (TTSAO) said it is both shocked and deeply disappointed.
—“This lack of direct communication leaves many of our member schools who have already devoted countless hours, resources, and significant funds to meet the original compliance requirements feeling undermined and disregarded,” he said.
Fletcher added that TTSAO and other safety organizations were not consulted. He argued a short grace period of two to three weeks would have been reasonable, but a nine-month extension is “excessive” and “rewards non-compliance.”
—
The Women’s Trucking Federation of Canada (WTFC) also appealed directly to Prabmeet Sarkaria, the transportation minister, to reverse the extension. In a letter, WTFC president Shelley Walker said the decision undermines compliant schools that had already invested in curriculum software, instructor training, upgraded simulators, and other administrative costs.
“Beyond the critical public safety implications, this repeated extension places a significant financial burden on compliant schools during these difficult times,” Walker said. WTFC warned that the delay sends a troubling signal that compliance is optional. The group called for a transparent explanation from the ministry, fast-tracking of early adopters, targeted support for compliant schools, and enforcement measures to deter those exploiting the reprieve.
Perhaps Mr Sarkaria is running cover for the kind of truck driving school operators featured in that CBC Marketplace piece, for whom compliance is not a priority under the strictures of Izzat. Perhaps, like so many politicians before him, he is merely on the take.
Another politician, this one a wannabe and south of the border in Indiana, appears to have the benefit of his group front of mind, rather than the safety of Indiana motorists, or of any motorist in North America, given how far many truckers tend to travel.
Siddharth ‘Sid’ Mahant came to the United States from India, and from a quick glance at his experiences, he appears to be a model immigrant - Mahant claims to have showed up here with $850 and the shirt on his back, and has now built up a fairly successful trucking company despite the failures of so many in the past four years of freight recession.
Mr Mahant is now in the running for a seat in the Indiana House of Representatives, which will be his second attempt at running for elected office in the state as a Republican. He has one very curious policy position, however, which would seem to be at odds with the federal Republican Party.
According to a Change.org petition run by Mr Mahant, he wants to challenge Indiana regulations that require those moving into the state from somewhere else, even if they have a CDL from another state, to re-take the Indiana written exam, which would have to be completed in English. Given the epic levels of fraud and bribery we see in other states with their DMVs and truly shoddy CDL Mills, and the crashes so many untrained and unvetted drivers are causing on our roads, you’d think Sid would support President Trump’s re-enforcement of the nearly 90 year old requirement that CDL holders can communicate in English, and maybe understand why his state doesn’t trust the CDLs of other states right off the get-go.
Per his petition -
Are you aware that even with extensive driving experience and a commercial driving license, individuals seeking residency in Indiana must pass the written knowledge exam to obtain an Indiana driver's license with a CDL endorsement? A CDL can only be obtained by meeting all requirements set by FMCSA, making it federally approved and allowing the individual to drive in America. The state of Indiana's challenge to FMCSA and the imposition of additional requirements raises questions about the state law's precedence over federal law. This law disproportionately affects first-generation immigrant families whose primary language is not English, impairing truck drivers and trucking companies from relocating to Indiana.
Perhaps Mr Mahant’s company has maybe been ‘successful’ by employing low paid illiterates to work for him? How much of an imposition is it to expect people working in a safety sensitive industry to follow federal regulations and communicate in the lingua franca of the road? Take an English as a Second Language Course first.
Perhaps Mr Mahant is expecting to hire more unskilled labor from his native India, rather than pay the market rates competent local drivers would expect?
Regardless, it seems that Mr Mahant’s candidacy is going to be taken out by the current outrage being expressed against he and other company owners like him, especially after yet another tragic killing of innocent motorists in America by an illiterate brought here from overseas, this time right in Indiana.
And possibly even more problematic for Mr Mahant’s complaint of the ‘disproportionate’ effects of Indiana requiring further confirmation of a CDL drivers competency, a week after that tragedy took place in Jay County, Indiana, just down the exact same road and in the same county, another trucker was witnessed blowing a stop sign and almost hitting a car. After being pulled over by the cops, it was discovered that this driver was a migrant, had no CDL whatsoever, and worked for a company who likewise had little respect for local safety regulations.
Perhaps we ought consider that maybe some groups of people are more concerned with their own self interest, and so much so, that in the face of an endless string of tragedies implicating their groups involvement, they are willing to look the other way and do nothing.
Per that piece on Izzat -
But in India, the problem is not the point. The point is the problem being exposed and the perceived insult to izzat from exposing the problem. The water pipe never gets fixed.
And neither, apparently, will our roads.
Due to those crashes in Indiana, and so many more over the past couple of years, here and around the world, media and political interest in the trucking industry is at an all time high, and powerful people are beginning to ask questions. The problem we are going to have in providing answers to them is the unwillingness of many on one side of the political and media commentariat to tell the truth, who would rather let certain secular pieties override dealing with reality.
Earlier in the piece I highlighted some examples of apologia for this group from various media in the US, and the unwillingness of places like the CBC to tell you who is who.
Since I began writing this, yet another in that particular genre of apologia and deflection was sent my way from Australia, and it has to be one of the better examples of identity politics run amok; but I will leave it up to you how to judge this.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-14/radio-racism-target-indian-drivers-road-freight-transport/106180274
Throughout the piece, we are regaled with horror stories of these guys being called names on the CB Radio (Australian truckers use VHF, not CBs) or otherwise targeted due to their ethnicity. And that’s fair enough, they ought not face verbal abuse like that in the course of their duties, and there are better ways to deal with the problems associated with the parasitization going on in the industry than resorting to that type of unnecessary and ignorant behavior.
But nowhere does ABC discuss truck crashes and their cost in lives, or the Australians displaced out of jobs, or the Australian version for the same problem their trucking industry has that Canada does with ‘Driver Inc’, which Ozzies call ‘Sham Contracting’.
Just like any mainstream media piece on trucking in America, ABC reference the driver shortage narrative, claiming that Australia is lacking 28,000 drivers … yet all the freight still moves, and missed delivery of product directly attributable to that shortage are never reported. As my mate Mike Williams from the On The Road Aussie Trucking Podcast puts it, the real shortage in Australian trucking, much like anywhere else, is of pay, and of respect.
The real humdinger in this bit of ‘journalism’, however, is a claim made by a professor of Human Resources Harridanism who claims that what does cause issues in trucking safety is … racism.
Sarah Anderson, a professor of Workplace Health, Safety and Wellbeing at Monash University, said there was little data about the extent of racism directed at overseas-born truck drivers in Australia but the problem was well-documented in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe.
She said truck driving, with its long hours, tight deadlines and numerous regulators, was already a stressful job, particularly if drivers did not have secure employment or their visa status was precarious.“The minute we add racism or aggression to a truck driver who needs attention to detail, who needs good decision-making, we’re actually impacting their ability to do their job safely,” Professor Anderson said.
Not training deficits or language and cultural barriers, not the stress from having most of your salary siphoned off to pay the gangsters who may have helped you emigrate, not being caught in a sham contract where you now have to deal with the government for paying taxes and whatever else comes out of your paycheck, no, none of that is the problem - the problem is being called names.
Without anyone in the mainstream media taking the issue seriously, it is going to be difficult to get certain political operators on board to address it correctly. We can’t afford to pretend this issue doesn’t exist, and that its simply a problem of, from the left, mere racism, or from the right, Biden’s border policies, or any other countries immigration policies. We have a multi-factorial situation of holes in various systems, both political and regulatory, meeting an industry narrative that is not true, and a worldwide migration crisis that has taken advantage, with various actors capitalizing and enriching themselves and their own countries at a cost to western working class truckers, and at the cost of many lives, while making the richest corporations and their shareholders even more wealthy.
The longer the mainstream ignores the real causes of this problem, and the more they dismiss the concerns of those watching the bodies of their fellow citizens be crushed under mangled wreckage, the more that those concerned citizens will take matters into their own hands.
I’ve got a book coming out next month, on March 24, which addresses this and many other issues in the trucking industry, while considering the fate of the North American trucker in 2026. If you liked this essay, I think you will like the book.
In America, you can pre-order directly from my publisher here -
https://creedandculture.com/books/end-of-the-road-inside-the-war-on-truckers/
In Canada, it is available for pre-order at Chapters/Indigo -
https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/end-of-the-road-inside-the-war-on-truckers/9781967613021.html
Or perhaps you can convince your local bookstore to order it for you and put it on their own shelves.
If you must -
https://www.amazon.com/End-Road-Inside-War-Truckers/dp/1967613028/
There will be an audiobook narrated by me as well, and as soon as details on that are available, an announcement will be made here immediately.
Thanks for reading, and as always - questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail can be directed to me here - gordilocks@protonmail.com
If you value my work, and are of means, please consider a paid subscription - it really does help keep the wolves away from the door. And if you aren’t of means, smash the subscribe button anyways, and my work will automatically appear in your inbox - I appreciate the readership regardless.
Keep reading about "more training, more training", but maybe the problem isn't training, maybe it's cultural attitudes. We all know accident rates are crazy worse in other countries.
The Carney gov't is now introducing a new transportation category for permanent residents, this means more of the same.
I am out on the 401 everyday, and everyday I see Indian trucks, engines turned up, doing a buck fifteen, tailgating other trucks and cars, regardless of weather.
How many times has my commute home been turned into a two hour slog after one of these illiterates shuts down the 401 due to snowy conditions and their complete lack of moral behaviour?
People I knew personally have been killed by these drivers.
How many Canadians must die in the name of GDP? Look to your political parties, there is no answer.