Daily trip inspections in Ontario: O. Reg. 199/07

Ontario is the province where working from the national standard instead of the provincial regulation will actually cost you something, because at least one defect is classified differently here than in the national model. Details below, with the section numbers, so you can check any of it.

This page is Ontario only. The national picture and the other provinces are on the hub page, and the annual mechanical inspection is a separate requirement covered under CVIP.

Get the form first, read the rest after

Free, no email required, every system with the minor and major defect beside it so a driver can classify a defect without leaving the cab. Check it against the Ontario column below before you put it in a truck running Ontario plates, because of the wheel seal difference.

What Ontario actually requires

The rule lives in Ontario Regulation 199/07, Commercial Motor Vehicle Inspections, made under section 107 of the Highway Traffic Act. Five things carry most of the weight.

1. Inspect every system in Column 1. Section 6 (1) requires the daily inspection to include every system and component listed in Column 1 of the applicable schedule. Not a selection, the whole column.
2. The inspection must be good enough to find the defect. Section 6 (2) puts it as being adequate to determine whether there is a major or minor defect as set out in the schedule.
3. A daily inspection is valid for 24 hours. Section 6 (3), and it is that plain.
4. Schedule 1 is the one for trucks. Section 5 (1) assigns Schedule 1 to trucks, tractors and trailers drawn by a truck or tractor. Buses take Schedule 2, motor coaches Schedule 3, school purposes buses Schedule 5.
5. The operator supplies the forms and the schedule. Section 7 (3) for the report forms, and clause 107 (4) (a) of the Act for the schedule itself.

Two useful permissions carriers often miss. Section 5 (3) lets an operator add information to a schedule to help whoever is doing the inspection. Section 5 (4) lets an operator delete a portion of a schedule covering a component the vehicle is not required to have and does not have. So a purpose built schedule for your own fleet is allowed, within those limits.

Schedule 1: the 23 parts, Ontario wording

Column 2 is a minor defect: record it on the report, report it to the operator, keep driving. Column 3 is a major defect: the vehicle does not move until it is repaired.

Source: Schedule 1 to O. Reg. 199/07, Commercial Motor Vehicle Inspections, as published on Ontario e-Laws, current version retrieved and verified 16 August 2026. Several entries in the regulation carry numbered footnotes pointing to the notes in section 19, which set the prescribed limits for pushrod stroke, air loss rate, tread depth and steering lash. Those limits are not reproduced here, read section 19 for them. Confirm the current version before relying on any of this.

Where Ontario differs from the national model

This is the reason this page exists rather than a row in a table.

A leaking wheel seal is a minor defect in Ontario. Schedule 1, Part 22, Column 2, paragraph (b). Record it, report it, keep the truck moving, get it fixed.

In the national Schedule 1, published by Nova Scotia from the CCMTA standard, a leaking wheel seal appears in the major defect column for the same system. Under that wording the truck stops.

That is not hypothetical. Alberta adopts the national schedule by reference instead of writing its own, at section 2 (g) of AR 121/2009, and section 9 (b) defines a major defect as whatever the national schedule says it is. So in Alberta the same leaking wheel seal is a major defect and the unit is parked.

Same truck, same seal weeping the same amount: a write-it-down in Ontario, a park-it in Alberta. A driver who learned the trade in one and is now running under the other will get this wrong in good faith, and a carrier that trained its drivers off a national checklist has trained them to the wrong answer for Ontario.

Two smaller wording differences worth knowing, though neither changes what you can do:

• Tires. Ontario splits the leak explicitly by whether you can hear it. Minor is a tire leaking if the leak cannot be heard, major is a leak that can be felt or heard, listed separately from a flat tire. The national wording reaches the same place with less precision.
• Suspension. Ontario qualifies the broken spring leaf major defect with "in any spring assembly", which matters on a multi-assembly unit.

I have compared three documents here: Ontario's regulation, Alberta's regulation, and Nova Scotia's published copy of the national schedule. I have not checked the remaining provinces line by line and am not going to imply I have. If you run in a fourth province, read its schedule against this one before you assume they match.

What has to be on the report

Section 7 (1) lists eight items, and they are not quite the same as other provinces ask for.

1. The licence plate number and plate jurisdiction of the vehicle
2. The operator's name
3. The date and time of the inspection
4. The city, town, village or highway location where the inspection was conducted
5. The printed name of the person who conducted the inspection
6. For a commercial motor vehicle, the odometer reading
7. Any major and minor defects found, or a statement that none were found
8. A statement, signed by the person who conducted the inspection, that the vehicle was inspected in accordance with the regulation

Items 1 and 8 are the ones that go missing. Plate jurisdiction gets dropped because the person filling in the form only ever sees Ontario plates. The signed compliance statement gets dropped because a lot of generic forms do not have a line for it, which means the form itself is the reason the record is non-compliant.

And section 7 (2): if the driver is not the person who did the inspection, the driver signs the report before driving. Yards where a mechanic or lead hand does the walk-around need that signature captured before the truck leaves, not at the end of the shift.

The two clocks: 20 days to submit, six months to keep

These get run together and they are separate obligations.

The driver has up to 20 days. Section 9 (1) requires the completed report to go to the operator as soon as possible after the inspection ceases to be valid, and in any event no later than 20 days after that point. Section 9 (2) says it goes to the operator's principal place of business or another address the operator has specified.

The operator keeps them at least six months. Section 15, and that clock starts from submission rather than from the inspection.

The other vehicle records run two years. Section 16 (1) covers identification records, the inspection and maintenance and repair history, the periodic inspection system, axle and suspension modifications, and copies of inspection certificates. Section 16 (2) requires those for at least two years, or six months after the vehicle stops being operated by you, whichever is shorter.

A carrier keeping trip inspection reports for six months and maintenance records for six months has met one requirement and missed the other by eighteen months. That is the most common Ontario recordkeeping error in this area.

Who is exempt

Section 4 (1) lifts Part II of the regulation and subsections 107 (4) to (12) of the Act for a defined list. Paraphrased, and worth reading in the original before you rely on one:

• An emergency vehicle responding to or returning from an emergency
• A commercial motor vehicle providing relief from an earthquake, flood, fire, famine, drought, epidemic, pestilence or other disaster
• A two-axle or three-axle truck, bus or tractor, not drawing a trailer, primarily used to transport primary products of a farm, forest, sea or lake produced or harvested by the driver or the driver's employer
• A municipal public transit bus, within the municipality or within 25 km of its boundary
• A commercial motor vehicle being road-tested for repairs within 30 km of the repair facility, by a certified automotive service or truck and coach technician or an apprentice
• Trailers drawn by a vehicle in one of those categories
• A trailer converter dolly that is not carrying a trailer

The farm exemption is the one people stretch. It requires two axles or three, no trailer, and produce harvested by you or your employer. A four-axle unit, or the same truck pulling a trailer, is back inside the regulation.

Minor, major, and what you can actually drive on

Section 2 does the legal plumbing: major defects are prescribed for subsection 107 (11) of the Act, minor defects for 107 (12).

What it means in the yard:

• Minor defect. Section 8 (3) lets the driver keep going, provided the defect has been entered on the daily inspection report as required by clause 107 (8) (a) of the Act. Entering it is the condition, not a formality.
• Major defect. The vehicle does not move until it is repaired.
• Found on the road. Section 8 (2) requires the driver to notify the operator by any means likely to come to their attention quickly, in addition to entering it on the report. A defect written on a sheet in the door pocket and mentioned nowhere else does not satisfy this.

That last one is the requirement paper systems quietly fail. The report gets filled in correctly and the notification never happens, because there is no mechanism for it beyond the driver remembering to phone.

Where this meets your safety program

Ontario carriers get sampled on this in a facility audit, and the sample is rarely last month. An auditor looking at COR or safety fitness evidence picks vehicles and dates and asks to see the reports, then follows the defects forward to see whether the repair happened and closed back against the original report.

The defect recorded and never closed out is the finding. It is the same shape as a corrective action left open in a COR audit, and it comes from the same place: somebody collected the record and nobody owned reading it.

If you hold COR in Ontario, your trip inspection records are part of that evidence rather than a separate transport file.

Doing this on paper, and doing it in the app

Paper works. What paper does not do is satisfy section 8 (2), because notifying the operator quickly is a separate act from writing on the sheet, and nothing about a clipboard makes it happen.

In the app, the same daily trip inspections are completed in the cab against this schedule, a defect notifies whoever owns the repair the moment it is recorded, and the repair closes back against the original report. That covers the notification duty and the closure evidence in the same motion.

If the written program those inspections sit inside is the part you are missing, we build carrier safety programs and stand them up in your own copy of the app.

Related

• Daily trip inspections across Canada is the hub, with the national standard and the other provinces.
• Trip inspections in Alberta is the province that adopts the national schedule instead, and disagrees with Ontario on the wheel seal.
• Pre-trip inspection: what the law requires covers the minor versus major split in practice.
• The circle check, step by step is the walk-around itself.
• NSC Standard 11 is the vehicle maintenance program these inspections feed.
• COR certification in Ontario if the audit side is what you are working on.