BRAMPTON, Ont. -- Last year alone, Randeep Sandhu lost more than $100,000 to sleazy load brokers. He says he has had it up to here and is not going to tolerate it anymore.

Sandhu is the boss at Load Solutions Inc., a general-freight carrier operating out of the south central Ontario town of Puslinch.

Last Friday, he and about 70 others presented Federal Transportation and Infrastructure Minister John Baird with a petition asking that the federal government "enact legislation that would require load brokers to be licensed by the government and require that all licensed load brokers be bonded to ensure that businesses are compensated for any losses that occur as a result of unscrupulous load brokers."

Transportation companies "are losing between five and 35 percent of their profits due to load brokers who broker loads and then abscond with the money," Sandhu told Baird.

The problem is, the brokers that Sandhu is targeting appear, technically, to be legitimate operators. He told Baird they purchase the corporate names of older companies with decent reputations and what's more, what they do is not necessarily illegal.
It's just, Sandhu says -- and many other truckers can attest to -- quite unethical. 

It's a problem as old as unregulated trucking. But one with few solutions to date. "They spend 15 days in the industry, make like $100,000 and then just disappear."

Sandhu says there are currently no regulations in place to prevent crooked freight brokerage firms from ripping companies off. Hopefully, that could change.

Four days later after the meeting, Sandhu told todaystrucking.com that he had already heard back from Baird's office and the response has given him reason for optimism.

"He's taking this very seriously," Sandhu told us. (As of Tuesday afternoon, Baird's office hadn't returned calls to our reporter.)

Sandhu also said he has the support of the legitimate load brokers, in the form of the National Transportation Brokers Association's president John Tittel, who told Sandhu in an email that his association "shares the concerns regarding the lack of regulation in the industry."

Roy Thacker is CEO of the recently launched freight-matching service called LoadSurfer and agrees with Sandhu's concerns. 

"The problem is not a new one," he says. "The problem is that there are really no requirements to regulate freight brokers like there are in the U.S., where brokers are required to post a bond in case of non-payment.

"If this were mandatory in Canada, it would weed out a lot of the shady brokers out there. This type of legislation would go a long way towards helping carriers such as Mr. Sandhu," Thacker says.

-- Read more about this in the August print issue of Today's Trucking.