Remarks for Scott Darling
FMCSA Chief Counsel
2015 Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators
Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada
June 16, 2015​

Thank you for kind introduction and the opportunity to speak with you today.

It is my honor to be here at the CCMTA annual meeting in Whitehorse with my colleagues from Canada and Mexico.

I am accompanied here today by members of our North American Borders Division, Chief Bryan Price and Transportation Specialist Carla Vagnini.

Together we have made great strides for highway safety in North America, but clearly there is still more to do.  You know this. That’s why you all are here today. So I would challenge this group to focus on four areas that I will discuss here today:

• Cross border partnership
• Commercial drivers licensing
• Harmonization of regulations and
• High-risk carriers.

But first, let’s put this in perspective…

• Each year about four thousand people die in large truck and bus crashes in the U.S. alone, and we won’t rest until that number is pushed down as close to zero as possible.
• To reach this goal, we look to our neighbors in Canada and Mexico to help us build a safe and efficient highway network spanning the entire continent of North America.
• We all share a common interest in highway safety. Last week outside New York City, a charter bus carrying Canadian students from Toronto was rear-ended by a New Jersey transit bus. Fortunately, none of the students were injured. 
• Nonetheless, this incident reminds us that our efforts to increase safety on U.S. roadways benefit your citizens, and vice versa.

I made the trip here to personally express my support for continued partnership between our Nations to achieve our shared goal of preventing crashes and fatalities involving large trucks and buses.

In this globalized world, people, vehicles, and goods routinely cross borders, fueling economic growth and jobs.  Our collective highway safety efforts also must cross borders just as easily. 

We share a common responsibility to make sure that motor carriers and CMV drivers that operate in the U.S., Canada and Mexico are held to high standards and, to the extent possible, the similar standards.

• That is why we must continue to work together to ensure that all trucks on North American roads are safe and those unsafe carriers and drivers are taken off the road.
• I am very pleased with our cooperation so far, and I see a number of areas that I think show promise for deeper ties.  

To succeed in holding motor carriers to the same, high safety standards, we must continuously work to harmonize regulations. 

• Our joint enforcement and compliance initiatives are more effective and seamless if the rules are largely the same throughout the continent. 
• That also helps our truck and bus companies to operate safely and remain in compliance across international borders. 
• A primary example is our rulemaking on Electronic Logging Devices (or ELDs).  We know this is very important to you. 
• We are on track to publish a Final Rule this year to require most motor carriers to use Electronic Logging Devices to improve the quality of logbook data and, therefore, compliance with hours of service safety rules. 
• My agency will continue to work closely with Canada and Mexico on the Electronic Logging Devices rulemaking – and other rulemakings—so that our regulations reinforce each other.

We can also agree that it is important that we work together to ensure our respective regulatory frameworks keep up with the pace of change—especially when it comes to properly licensing drivers. 

• We should continue our work to update the 1989 agreement between the U.S. and Canada recognizing each other’s commercial driver’s licenses. 
• It has been more than 25 years since our agreements were formalized, and since then we have both made improvements and raised our standards. 
• The next step is to finish the work necessary to revalidate our agreements and sign an MOU.
• We thank our colleagues from Mexico for their efforts on a revised MOU on Mexican and U.S. CDLs.  We look forward to executing that new agreement in the next few months.

A key component of highway safety is maximizing enforcement resources to identify high-risk carriers and drivers and bring them into compliance or remove them from the road.

• We remain committed to facilitating a robust exchange of safety data to give our collective enforcement staffs a clear and complete picture of an international carrier’s history and overall safety record.
• And, we believe it is imperative that we continue to collaborate to address high-risk motor carriers that operate across borders.
• At the end of the day, we all know that if we work together to remove these unsafe carriers, then we all benefit from safer roads.

At FMCSA, we value our strong cross-border relationship with you.  We share an understanding that roadway safety has no borders or boundaries.  But we also recognize that exchanging information is critical to achieving our safety goals.

We remain open to new ways to partner with you in our commitment to safety. 

In our progress for safety, we have important goals we still must reach.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you.  Have a great meeting.

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