THIS IS A DIGEST REPORT IN LIGHT OF OVERNIGHT WAR EVENTS.
NOTE: I wrote this piece and dropped a podcast on the trucking crisis last night before the America/Israel attacks on Iran, which at this hour are in full explosive force. The Neocons and Israel lobby seem to be in full control of the American government. Iran is the last of seven Muslim countries from the list drawn up by U.S. and exposed by General Wesley Clarke, that were up for regime change after 9/11.
80% of Americans are against this move by Trump who pitched himself as “the anti-war president” during the election campaign. I, like many others fell for it. Trump even criticized the Neocons for sending young Americans off to fight . Now, just two weeks after he announced his absurdly named Board of Peace, Trump has set the Middle East on fire.
Countries all over the Middle East are reporting incoming missiles. American bases seem to be the target.
Iran’s response last year over American attacks on its nuclear facilities was restrained but at this moment leadership is threatening something bigger. Forty killed at an Iranian girl’s school now being reported by Al Jazeera. This obviously was a civilian target but unclear if it was hit by Israeli or American hardware.
Iran is aiming at targets friendly to the Americans including Qatar - most intercepted.
Mullahs are vowing not to step down in what is obviously a regime change effort. America is putting pressure on Iranian civilians to rise up — but there is no indication yet that will happen.
I will be monitoring this over the weekend. Al Jazeera, Greenwald, Macgregor who broke the story overnight on X, and Judge Nap are good resources.
Earlier this week, Macgregor told an interviewer he doesn’t think people in power care about casualties and says they view civilians as “cockroaches”. But we knew that, didn’t we?
Trump said “no more stupid foreign wars.”
One more point — an Al Jazeera reporter in the West Bank says the word in Israel is that Netanyahu was able to drag Trump into a “regime change war” and Netanyahu’s latest comments seem to suggest that this in fact is exactly what’s happening. Trump is talking about nuclear capabilities — Netanyahu is talking about changing the government.
Hoothis are involved and Hezbollah may soon be, too. US aircraft carriers and a large supporting fleet are heading to the region.
No word yet that downtrodden Iranians are taking part. And I suspect they won’t.
Meanwhile, this is the second time Iran was negotiating a nuclear treaty with American diplomats — and was attacked. But tension was starting to infect the talks and it is reported they were paused in Geneva on Thursday. Other reporting today says an agreement was within reach.
Just breaking — American diplomat involved in the nuclear talks, Alan Eyre has just told Al Jazeera that Iran was in a weakened state. And that’s what prompted the mission now underway. He is saying that Trump hopes this air campaign will lead to regime change. His military advisors were doubtful. Eyre calls it “a unilateral action that contravenes international law.” Those words from an American diplomat in DC this morning.
Cenk is a hothead — but totally right.
Beware of propaganda. It is everywhere right now. Will do some more reporting for you over the weekend.
This week’s show. It’s a great one. Please leave your comments about dangerous highways below.
Above is the aftermath of a collision that occurred on the turnpike in southern Florida. A migrant driver, with no English pulled a U-turn, which left his trailer blocking the highway. A van couldn’t stop in time and drove underneath. Three people were killed.
To the right, in the circle is the van which is about to drive under neath the improperly stopped trailer.
A Special investigative report this weekend on the state our our highways. Badly trained drivers who don’t speak English, overloaded vehicles, speeding, collisions against slow or stopped traffic. These scary events seem to happen every day now. Meanwhile an influx of migrants get licensed in mills that don’t provide the training needed to maintain safety on our highways.
Canada doesn’t keep numbers of accidents based on ethnicity but a reporter for the National Post has been keeping track.
All Canadians can do to establish that pattern is pick through news stories and draw common themes because the statistics required to make a data-based argument simply don’t exist. Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan all told me that they aren’t tracking safety incident statistics by driver nationality (though the Alberta database, I’m told, would allow one to compile nationality statistics with some manual digging; furthermore, the new inclusion of citizenship data on driver’s licenses could help). Ontario wouldn’t tell me if it tracked driver nationality at all, and instead told me to file a freedom-of-information request on the topic.
From what I’ve found, the largest provinces with the most commercial drivers cannot say whether non-citizens are responsible for a disproportionate number of fatalities, safety violations or traffic infractions, let alone point to any particular country. It may be the case that such a problem exists, or it may not.
We do know that Canadian-born truck drivers and their non-citizen counterparts can cause fatal collisions. And that there are many gaffes by drivers of unknown origin, documented by the bucketload by online networks like Skilled Truckers Canada. And that for every time that a driver is named by police after charges are laid, there are plenty others that aren’t — so whatever anecdotal observations we can make from news stories where drivers are named are going to be incomplete.
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We also know that drivers from the Indian subcontinent made up one-fifth of Canada’s truckers back in 2016, while immigrants made up one-third — and that some trucking companies are abusing the temporary foreign worker program. With more drivers of a particular group will naturally come more collisions from that group. And indeed, we are seeing more news about Indian-origin drivers in Canada facing charges stemming from terrible, sometimes fatal, collisions. Whether there’s a disproportionate effect, we simply don’t know.
So, we’re left to look through the anecdotes, and wonder for ourselves if our immigration and trucking sectors have come together to make Canadian roads less safe.
In Ontario in 2016, Sarbjit Singh Matharu, driving on two hours of sleep and with a falsified logbook, caused an 11-vehicle pileup on Highway 400 and killed four people. He would get eight years in prison. Matharu, a permanent resident, has been trying to fight his deportation, arguing that he should be able to stay in Canada on humanitarian and rehabilitation grounds.
Highway 401 has also been a great source of grief. In 2017, a year after Matharu’s collision, transport truck driver Baljinder Singh, also a permanent resident, rammed a queue of vehicles that had slowed to a stop in a construction zone, killing four, two of whom were cousins on the way to a family golf tournament. Singh dragged out his proceedings for three years before pleading guilty and received only three years in prison. His lawyer even asked for an immigration discount. He’s been fighting deportation since then.
In 2019, Gurdeep Singh Dhaliwal was charged with stunt driving his semi on the 401, travelling less than 10 metres behind another transport truck. In 2022, Mehakdeep Singh received five years in prison for killing two young children and their grandmother on the same highway. They had been sitting in the back of the family SUV on the tail end of a long line of slowing vehicles when he rammed into them at full speed. Cab footage from his truck shows him on his phone, ignoring the queue of brake lights visible on the road ahead before colliding into them. His logbooks were falsified and he shouldn’t have been on the road that day.
And in 2024, Balwinder Dhaliwal was charged with driving his transport truck the wrong way on the 401. Another trucker, Ravinder Rai, was caught driving drunk that year on Highway 11.
The same headlines can be found elsewhere: just this year, Jagmeet Grewal was sentenced to 10 years in prison for — this story is getting familiar — killing four people by crashing into a line of vehicles on a Laval highway while not paying attention to the road, and not being legally allowed to drive. It also happened near Brossard, south of Montreal, in 2022: 10 people were injured, and an 11-year-old boy and a 42-year-old woman were killed when a truck smashed into the back of a construction queue; driver Baljeet Singh fled to the United States and was only just returned to Canada this month after several months of extradition hearings.
Harjot Singh, somehow working as a trucker in 2023 despite being in Canada on a student visa, blasted through a small-town Quebec intersection on a video call at 80 km/h where he was required to stop. He ploughed into a family vehicle, ejecting the parents and seriously injuring the whole family. Afterward, he fled the scene, refusing to help or call 911. When he was caught by police 12 kilometres later, he lied and told them he had called emergency services. In March, he was sentenced to a pathetic one year in prison and an 18-month driving ban. In July, he was granted parole for deportation purposes.
A similar fatal case happened in Manitoba in 2024 when transport truck driver Navjeet Singh ripped through a stop sign, resulting in a collision that killed a woman and her eight-year-old daughter. He fled Canada after the collision and was on the run for more than nine months afterward, and was only caught late August upon re-entering the country via Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. He was granted bailearlier this month, despite having demonstrated an inability to co-operate with Canadian authorities.
Meanwhile on the prairies, truck driver Gaganpreet Singh fled the scene of a fatal Saskatoon collision in April, but was later caught near Calgary; despite this, he is currently out on bail.
And in Alberta, a little girl was killed in 2018 when a gravel truck hit her school bus; Sukhdeep Deol knew his brakes didn’t work properly prior to the crash, and drove anyway. He was sentenced to probation in 2020. More recently, driver Navdeep Singh Gakhal was charged in February with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death, following a November head-on highway collision involving a transport truck that took the life of one Albertan man.
In B.C., one company associated with the Chohan family has become notorious for striking overpasses. And even though they were banned from operating in the province (over which Chohan is now suing), other drivers continue to do the same: earlier this month, Lovedeep Singh was fined $2,500 for an overpass strike. Another company, Majha Trucking, is also being investigated for multiple strikes in B.C. That province, which has developed a reputation for harbouring trucking immigration schemes, has seen a 73 per cent increase in deaths resulting from collisions involvingheavy vehicles compared to last year.
Of course in Canada, the saddest ever crash involved a bus full of young hockey players who were on their way to a game for the Humboldt, Saskatchewan team. A semi blew through two stops and nailed the team bus. It was a tragedy encompassing so much sadness, tears fell forever. Beautiful boys in the prime of their young years were killed, others were maimed, spread across the scene like helpless sacks of wheat. We put hockey sticks outside of our doors to remember.
The driver, a Sikh, pleaded guilty in order to save the families from the details of a trial. He served some time and is now fighting extradition.
We need to get these badly trained driver off our roads. And we need to pay our skilled drivers a decent wage. It is the only way.
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