Albertans lack confidence in road tests, licence fee structures
Along with dentist fees Albertans are also paying a premium for road tests for driver’s licences.
Alberta’s road testing fees can be as much as five times the average of those charged in other provinces, depending on the class of driver’s licence, according to a Tantus Solutions Group report this week.
You’ll pay $22 for a motorcycle road test in Saskatchewan, $20 in Prince Edward Island, and an average of $145 in Alberta, according to information released this week.
A Class 1 licence, for truck drivers, can cost as much as $219, which is three to four times higher than other provinces. A regular Class 5 driver’s licence, the kind most of us have, costs $90 in Alberta which is two or three times as much as in other provinces. Considering there is a monopoly on this “commodity” the price difference is unconscionable.
You don’t have the right to say I don’t like this licence office, I think they are rippling me off so I am going to take my business elsewhere. You have no alternative. You are a sitting duck and that means the government must make this fairer.
In Alberta the authority for road test examinations and the issuing of drivers’ licences was given to the private sector, through private registry agencies, in 1993 under a former government.
Registry agencies set the fees with the companies that do the actual road tests and give $5 from every test to the provincial government. It is likely the only province in Canada that does it this way.
The Tantus Solutions Group report was commissioned in part because there were more than 40 investigations of “questionable conduct” related to road tests. Allegations include sexual-harassment and people being deliberately failed so that they would have to take the test again and pay for another test.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the lack of oversight, inconsistency, exploitation, and no independent data to verify or dispute allegations such as the use of video recording in vehicles used for road tests.
Service Alberta Minister Brian Malkinson has indicated the government may make substantial changes including perhaps returning to government workers doing the road tests.
Whether the road test examiners are government employees or contracted through the licence registry office they are still humans and therefore liable to make mistakes, intentional or not. There need to be measures in place to minimize those and a mechanism to provide evidence when an allegation of nefarious conduct is made. A video in the vehicle during a road test would go a long way towards this.
The report also mentions that government staff who are supposed to currently do regular checks on road test examiners, are not reaching their targets. That is a big concern and somebody in charge should have raised this issue long before the report.
Regardless of the changes that are on the horizon the public needs to be able to depend that the systems that are in place are working.
After this report, all those who feel they were unfairly treated in a road test, and the many seniors who have made allegations about this in the past, will feel vindicated. Now we need reasonable fees in line with other provinces and we need checks and balances in place to restore confidence in the system.
(Gillian Slade is a News reporter. To comment on this and other editorials, go to www.medicinehatnews.com/opinions, email her at gslade@medicinehatnews.com or call her at 403-528-8635.)