Owner of trucking firm in Broncos crash charged
Alberta probe cites violations of safety, compliance regulations
SASKATOON Scott Thomas says he felt something close to vindication upon learning that the owner of an Alberta trucking company involved in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash that killed his son now faces a battery of charges.
“This type of accident doesn’t happen because of one thing; it happens because several things went wrong,” said Thomas, whose 18-year-old son Evan died in the April 6 collision between the team’s bus and a semi.
“To me, it just acknowledges what I felt in my gut right from the start,” Thomas added.
Sixteen people were killed and another 13 were injured when the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League team’s bus collided with a semi tractor-trailer at a highway intersection north of Tisdale just over six months ago.
Alberta Transportation Minister Brian Mason said Wednesday that Sukhmander Singh of Adesh Deol Trucking Ltd. is charged with non-compliance with federal and provincial safety regulations over a six-month period.
The eight charges include failure to maintain logs for drivers’ hours of service, failure to monitor the compliance of a driver under safety regulations, having more than one daily log for any day and failure to have or follow a written safety program.
Adesh Deol Trucking’s licence was suspended shortly after the crash. Mason told the Calgary Herald in April that the company began operating the previous fall and had been compliant “up until this point.”
“The charges follow an investigation that was completed by Alberta Transportation into the collision,” Mason said. “The investigation found multiple instances of noncompliance of various transportation regulatory requirements in a six-month period.”
Reached in Calgary, Singh said he didn’t have any comment on the charges. His first court appearance is Nov. 9 in Calgary.
Saskatchewan RCMP spokesman Cpl. Rob King said the Alberta government’s investigation of the trucking company is “totally unrelated” to the RCMP’S probe of the collision, which wrapped up in early July.
That investigation resulted in 29-year-old Jaskirat Singh Sidhu being charged with 16 counts of dangerous driving causing death and 13 counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm.
Sidhu has yet to enter a plea on any of the 29 charges.
Defence election was scheduled for earlier this month in Melfort provincial court, but was adjourned to Oct. 23 after his lawyer requested additional time to review the file.
Thomas said he had no idea Alberta was conducting its own investigation, but that its findings appear to support his suspicion that no one factor was responsible for the collision.
“I’m encouraged that the authorities, if you will, are taking this accident for what it was — it was a serious, serious tragedy and they’re giving it the attention that it needs.”