Acceptance forms a contract of carriage on terms set by the province the load starts in — which is exactly why the screening should be automatic and the acceptance should not.
Key takeaways
Automate the screening, not the acceptance. Build a rules layer that rejects or holds every tender failing a hard test — hours, equipment, authority, insurance, dangerous-goods qualification, border timing — and let a named person accept what survives. That split works because acceptance is not an administrative act. It forms a contract of carriage on terms you may not have chosen, and it commits a driver whose lawful capacity is finite and measurable.
Most carriers get this backwards. They try to automate the yes and hand-check the no. The yes is where the liability sits; the no is where the volume sits.
For extra-provincial trucking, you do not simply agree to the shipper’s paperwork. Under the federal Conditions of Carriage Regulations, the conditions of carriage and limitations of liability that apply are those set out in the laws of the province in which the transport originates — and only where a province has no enactment dealing specifically with them do the parties’ own agreed terms govern. The origin point of the load, not your head office and not the shipper’s, selects the rulebook.
That matters in money. Take British Columbia as the worked case. Where a load originates there, the Specified Conditions of Carriage in Schedule 3 of Division 37 of the Motor Vehicle Act Regulations cap loss or damage at $4.41 per kg ($2 per lb) on the total weight of the shipment, unless a higher value is declared on the face of the bill of lading by the consignor. The same Schedule gives the claimant sixty days after delivery to give written notice of loss, damage or delay, or nine months from the date of shipment where delivery never happens, with the final statement of claim filed within nine months. A tender that arrives with a declared value buried in a PDF attachment has just changed your exposure, and a rules layer can flag that in the seconds before a dispatcher clicks accept.
The paperwork obligation attaches at acceptance too. In British Columbia the regulation requires that where freight is accepted for shipment, the carrier must at the time of acceptance issue a bill of lading showing the consignor, date, originating point, originating and connecting carriers, consignee, destination and particulars of the goods including weight and description — with a space for declared value and a conspicuous statement of whether liability is limited. Acceptance and documentation are the same moment, not two moments.
These are the tests where the answer is a fact, not a judgement. They are the ones worth wiring.
1. Lawful capacity. The federal Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations prohibit a motor carrier from requesting, requiring or allowing a driver to drive after 13 hours of driving time or 14 hours of on-duty time in a day, and after 16 hours have elapsed since the last period of at least 8 consecutive hours off duty. Over the week, a driver on cycle 1 must not drive after accumulating 70 hours of on-duty time in any period of 7 days; on cycle 2 the limits are 120 hours in 14 days, and 70 hours without having taken at least 24 consecutive hours off duty. Every one of those is arithmetic your electronic logging data already contains. A tender whose transit time cannot fit inside the hours the assigned driver has left should never reach a human.
2. Dangerous goods. If the commodity is regulated, the question is not whether you own a placard. The Transportation of Dangerous Goods Regulations require a person who handles, offers for transport or transports dangerous goods to be adequately trained and hold a training certificate, or to work in the presence and under the direct supervision of someone who is — and an employer must not direct or allow an employee to do that work otherwise. Disclosure runs the other way as well: under the British Columbia conditions, a person shipping explosives or dangerous goods without previous full disclosure to the carrier is liable for all loss or damage caused, which is a clause worth having your system quote back at a shipper who tenders an undeclared commodity.
3. Authority and insurance. A provincial authority may not issue a safety fitness certificate to an extra-provincial truck undertaking without written proof that it holds minimum liability coverage of $1,000,000 for each motor vehicle, and $2,000,000 for each vehicle transporting the dangerous goods for which an emergency response assistance plan must be filed. Cargo cover is separate and provincial: in British Columbia a carrier operating a business vehicle must secure and maintain cargo insurance satisfactory to the director and produce proof on request, with a listed set of bulk commodity exemptions. A tender that exceeds your cargo limit is a rejection, not a negotiation.
4. Border timing. On a southbound or northbound tender with a crossing, the clock is fixed. In the highway mode, CBSA requires conveyance and cargo information to be received and validated within 30 days and no later than one hour before arrival at the first point of arrival, and messages received less than one hour before the transmitted estimated time of arrival are accepted but generate an “insufficient review time” warning, with penalties potentially applicable. If the tender’s pickup window makes that impossible, the system should say so before anyone commits.
The hours of service rules do not only bind carriers. They provide that no motor carrier, shipper, consignee or other person shall request, require or allow a driver to drive, and no driver shall drive, if driving would be likely to jeopardize the safety or health of the public, the driver or the carrier’s employees, if the driver is subject to an out-of-service declaration, or if doing so would not comply with the Regulations. British Columbia repeats the duty in its own words at section 37.06 of Division 37.
So a shipper who tenders an impossible schedule is exposed — but that is cold comfort when it is your certificate under review. The practical use of the rule is upstream: it is the reason a documented, automatic rejection with a reason code is worth more than a phone call. It creates a record that the load was declined because it could not be run lawfully.
Worked example: a nine-truck Ontario carrier and a Thursday afternoon tender
A Mississauga carrier receives 40 to 60 tenders a week from three shippers, most of them for lanes it runs anyway. Two dispatchers were reading each one, checking a whiteboard, and replying. Tenders arriving after 15:00 were routinely accepted on optimism.
The rules layer they built does four things and nothing else. It reads the tender, pulls the assigned driver’s remaining cycle hours from the logging system, and rejects automatically where the transit plus the appointment window cannot fit inside the 13-hour driving and 14-hour on-duty limits. It holds any tender whose commodity field matches a dangerous-goods list unless a certificated driver is on the board. It holds any tender whose stated value exceeds the cargo policy. And it holds any cross-border tender whose pickup leaves under two hours to transmit.
Everything else is presented to a dispatcher with the four checks shown as passed. Nothing is accepted by the software. The measurable change was not speed — it was that the Thursday-afternoon acceptances stopped, because the reason for declining was now a printed line rather than an argument.
Rate. Relationship. Whether an awkward load is worth taking to protect a lane. Whether to accept with a condition attached. Those are commercial judgements and they belong to a dispatcher or an owner, who signs.
Keep that boundary explicit in writing, because the obligations above attach to the carrier and its named officers, not to a software vendor. A tool can extract, compare, flag and draft the reply. A person accepts, and their name is on it.
Technically yes; we would not. Acceptance forms a contract on terms selected by the law of the province where the transport originates, and those terms differ. A one-click confirmation with the checks pre-cleared takes a dispatcher three seconds and keeps a human accountable for the commitment.
Not automatically. The Regulations point first to the conditions of carriage and limitations of liability set out in the laws of the originating province, and only where the province has no such enactment do the parties’ agreed conditions apply. Whether a particular contract term displaces a particular provincial condition is a legal question specific to the wording — worth advice before you sign a shipper’s master agreement rather than after a claim.
Remaining hours against required transit. It is the check that most often turns a profitable-looking tender into a violation, and it is the one your dispatch system already has the data for.
A tender you accept sets where the truck ends up, which is the real cost of a bad acceptance. Read it alongside finding backhauls out of a lane and cutting deadhead kilometres.
A 30-minute call is enough to map the four or five checks that would clear most of your inbox.
