Speak English, or Park It

For decades, a rule sat in the US federal motor carrier regulations that almost nobody enforced. A commercial driver, it said, must be able to read and speak English well enough to converse with the public, understand highway signs, respond to officials, and make entries on reports and records. It was written in 1970, it was rarely acted on, and most of the industry forgot it was there. In the summer of 2025 it woke up. Now a driver who cannot satisfy an inspector's English check at the roadside is not warned or ticketed. The truck is parked, on the spot, and cannot move until a qualified driver takes the wheel.

This is one of those regulatory shifts that sounds like someone else's problem until you trace the map. It is a US rule, aimed mostly at a US debate, and the drivers being pulled off the road are overwhelmingly not Canadian. But the enforcement policy draws one specific line that should make every Canadian carrier running south pay attention: the exemption that softens the rule at the Mexican border does not exist at ours. For a BC carrier like us that lives on Canada-US lanes, that single asymmetry is the whole story. Here is what changed, what it is doing, and what it means for freight that crosses at Pacific Highway, Emerson, or Windsor.

What Changed at the Roadside

Two things happened in quick succession in the first half of 2025. First, in April, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy signed an order directing the FMCSA to enforce the English language proficiency requirement in 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2), reversing a 2016 guidance that had told inspectors not to place drivers out of service for language alone. Second, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, the body that writes the roadside inspection rulebook used across North America, added English language proficiency to its North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria effective June 25, 2025. That second step is the one with teeth, because an out-of-service criterion is not a fine; it is an order that the vehicle stops moving.

In practice, an inspector conducts the check in two parts: a spoken interview, where the driver must respond to questions without an interpreter, an app, or cue cards, and a highway sign recognition element. Fail either, and the driver is placed out of service under the new criterion. The load sits until the carrier can put a compliant driver in the seat, which on a cross-border lane, hundreds of miles from the home terminal, is rarely quick or cheap.

The Numbers So Far

The scale of the enforcement has been substantial, and lopsided. In roughly the first year, the FMCSA and its state partners flagged well over 60,000 drivers as non-compliant during inspections, and placed around 16,000 of them out of service specifically for English proficiency. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance logged 12,308 out-of-service violations under the criterion in just the second half of 2025, the first six months it was live. A single coordinated enforcement blitz in January 2026 produced roughly 500 driver out-of-service orders on its own.

But look at who is being parked. Of all those out-of-service orders, only 68 involved Canadian drivers. The overwhelming majority were drivers domiciled in Mexico, with hotspots in border states; Texas alone accounted for 582 out-of-service orders, while California and Minnesota combined managed just four over one multi-month stretch. In other words, this is not a rule that has been sweeping Canadian trucks off American highways. The direct hit to Canadian fleets has, so far, been small. The reason to care is not the current body count. It is the structural exposure sitting underneath it.

Why Canadian Drivers Are More Exposed Than They Think

Here is the asymmetry that matters. The FMCSA's enforcement policy carves out a specific exception: a driver inspected while operating inside the designated commercial zones along the US-Mexico border is not placed out of service for an English failure, regardless of where the driver or carrier is domiciled. It is a pragmatic carve-out for the dense, short-haul drayage traffic that shuttles across the southern border all day. Crucially, as trade lawyers at Miller Thomson have flagged, there is no equivalent exemption anywhere along the US-Canada border. A Canadian driver who clears at Surrey or Sarnia is subject to the full out-of-service criterion from the first mile of US soil.

So the paradox is this: the drivers being parked today are mostly southern-border drivers who benefit from a zone exemption, while Canadian drivers, who are rarely parked today, enjoy no exemption at all. The buffer protecting Canadian fleets right now is not legal; it is simply that most Canadian cross-border drivers already speak workable English and that enforcement intensity has been concentrated in the south. Neither of those is a guarantee. If a US administration decides to run the same January-style blitzes on northern lanes, the legal shield Canadian carriers are relying on does not exist. That is a thin thing to build a cross-border operation on, and it compounds the other frictions we have written about in cross-border freight in 2026 and the tariff war's cost to Canadian trucking.

What an Out-of-Service Order Actually Costs

To understand why carriers treat this as more than a paperwork risk, price out a single out-of-service event on a US lane. The truck stops where it is inspected. The load, often time-sensitive and under a delivery appointment, is now stranded. The carrier has to dispatch a replacement driver, sometimes flying or driving someone hundreds of miles to a weigh station or inspection pad, or arrange a relay. The original driver has to be repatriated. Detention and layover costs stack up. The customer, who does not care whose rule caused it, sees a late or failed delivery.

None of that shows up as a line-item fine, which is exactly why it is easy to underestimate. The direct penalty for the violation is almost beside the point; the damage is in the downtime, the recovery logistics, and the relationship. For a small or mid-size Canadian fleet, one badly timed out-of-service order on a marquee customer's freight can cost more than a season of the margin we described in the half-load paradox. It is the same lesson as the training and licensing crackdowns we covered in Quebec's move against Ontario licences: compliance you can prove is cheaper than compliance you have to explain after the fact.

Should Canada Bring In Its Own Rule?

The US move has reopened an old question north of the border: should Canada have its own language-proficiency standard for commercial drivers? The debate, canvassed in Truck News, is genuinely hard. On one side, road safety advocates argue a driver who cannot read an emergency detour sign or communicate at a crash scene is a hazard regardless of nationality. On the other, Canada's testing regime already reflects a multilingual reality: Ontario offers the Class A written knowledge test in about 20 languages and British Columbia in 12, while the road tests themselves are conducted only in English or French with no interpreters permitted.

Layer on the legal framework and it gets harder still. Any Canadian language requirement would have to survive human-rights scrutiny under the Meiorin test, which allows a discriminatory standard only if it is rationally connected to the job, adopted in good faith, and reasonably necessary, including proof that accommodating individuals would cause undue hardship. That is a real bar, and it is why, as one commentator dryly noted, Canadian lawmakers tend to tiptoe around the issue. Our own view is that the more useful conversation is not about mandating a language so much as guaranteeing a competency: every commercial driver, in whatever mix of languages, must be able to do the safety-critical communication the job demands. That is defensible on safety grounds and sidesteps the culture-war framing the US debate has taken on.

How Keylink Handles It

Keylink is a BC-based, asset-based full truckload carrier built around Canada-US freight, which means this rule lands squarely in the lane we actually run. We are not watching this from the sidelines the way a domestic-only fleet can. Every driver we send south is, by definition, exposed to the full out-of-service criterion the moment they cross, with no border-zone cushion to fall back on.

Our approach is not complicated, and it is not new: we verify that our drivers can handle roadside communication in English before we ever dispatch them across the line, we keep that verification documented in the qualification file, and we treat the roadside check as a standard we already meet rather than a hurdle we hope to clear. The point is not that language enforcement is welcome or unwelcome; it is that a cross-border carrier's job is to make sure a customer's freight never sits at a US scale house for a reason the carrier could have controlled. When you hand a load to a fleet that lives on these lanes, that foresight is exactly what you are paying for. If your freight runs Canada-US and you want to know how a carrier keeps it moving through a tightening compliance environment, that is a conversation we are always glad to have.

Sources and Further Reading