Three months, three years or five — the answer depends on which document you are holding and which province set the rule.
Key takeaways
There is no single Canadian number, because retention is set province by province and the clock differs for each document. British Columbia is the clearest published example: a carrier must keep the original of each trip inspection report for at least three months, while the vehicle’s inspection and repair history has to be held for the last three years of ownership plus six months after the vehicle is sold, and the broader carrier record set has to stay accessible for the current calendar year and the following four. All three periods are set out in Division 37 and Division 25 of the Motor Vehicle Act Regulations.
The practical answer for a carrier operating in more than one province is to keep to the longest period that applies to you and to organize records by unit and by driver, because that is how an auditor asks for them.
British Columbia’s rules give a complete chain for the daily report. The driver prepares a legible written trip inspection report before driving the vehicle for the first time in a day, stating the plate, the unit or trailer number, any defect in the listed items, any other defect that may affect safe operation, or that no defect was found, plus the date and a signature. The driver must have the current report in the vehicle and produce it to a peace officer on request. The original goes to the carrier within 20 days. The carrier files it at its principal place of business within 30 days of receiving it and keeps the original for at least three months, available for inspection throughout that period.
Sitting between those steps is the corrective-action rule that catches carriers out: nobody may drive the vehicle until the carrier or its agent has either repaired the defects that may affect safe operation and certified on the report that they were corrected, or certified on the report that correction is unnecessary. The report is not only a record of a look around the truck — it is the document that has to carry the sign-off.
Ontario states the same reporting duties without publishing a retention figure on its public guidance page. A driver must record defects on the inspection report and notify the operator; with no defect the inspection is valid for 24 hours; a minor defect is recorded and reported as soon as possible and the operator must repair anything that fails the performance standards; a major defect means the vehicle cannot be operated and must be repaired before it is driven. Those rules are on Ontario’s commercial vehicle safety requirements page.
The certificate has a life of its own, and so does the paper behind it. In British Columbia the authorized person who performs an inspection must complete and sign the report, give one copy to the operator, provide a copy to the facility operator to forward to the director, and retain a copy for the facility’s own record; a copy of the report must be carried in the vehicle while the certificate is in force. The designated inspection facility must mail the first copy to the director within 10 days and must keep proper records of each inspection it carries out for not less than 18 months.
That is the shop’s obligation, not yours. The carrier’s obligation is the longer one: the owner of the vehicle must, during the last three years of ownership and for six months after disposing of it, keep a record of each inspection made of the vehicle and of every component covered by the standards, together with every replacement and repair made after each inspection. On a sale, those records can be handed to the buyer with the buyer’s consent, and the buyer then has to keep them as if it had owned the vehicle for that period — a detail worth raising in any equipment purchase, and one that Treadstone Law flags in buying and selling a trucking company.
British Columbia sets out what a carrier must keep at its principal place of business: a driving-record transcript for each driver, dated the later of the hire date and one year from the previous transcript; the records required by the laws of any jurisdiction for each driver, including notifications of accidents, violations and convictions, which the driver must deliver within 15 days; for each vehicle requiring a safety certificate, the inspection and maintenance records, the manufacturer defect notices with evidence they were corrected, and records of accidents causing injury or death or total property damage including cargo of $1,000 or more; and any safety plan and any scheduled maintenance plan. With the exception of the hours-of-service and inspection record sets, those records must stay readily accessible for inspection and audit for the calendar year in which they were made and the following four calendar years.
An inspector may enter the place where those records are kept during business hours and conduct a compliance review or audit, and may require the carrier to deliver the records to a specified office at a specified time. Ontario runs the same play under a different name: a facility audit examines records including vehicle inspection, maintenance and repair, and violations identified may result in charges against the operator, the driver or both, with results and related convictions affecting the CVOR record.
Worked example: what a three-year-old defect costs
The event. A trailer is involved in a collision. Counsel for the other side asks for every inspection and repair record for that trailer.
What exists. The daily reports for the last three months, because those were kept to the minimum. The annual certificates. No repair orders older than a year, because the shop invoices were filed by supplier and by month rather than by unit.
The gap. A brake defect reported eleven months earlier cannot be shown to have been repaired. The repair almost certainly happened; the evidence that it happened does not exist in a form anyone can produce.
The rule that governed it. In British Columbia the inspection and repair record has to be kept for the last three years of ownership, not three months. The three-month figure applies to the original trip inspection report and nothing else.
The cheap fix. File by unit from the first day the unit enters the fleet. A repair order that is not attached to a vehicle number is, for audit purposes, a repair order that does not exist.
Do not fold logs into the same retention rule. British Columbia’s hours-of-service provisions carry their own periods — the exemption for carriers keeping manual records, for instance, requires those records and their supporting records to be kept for a minimum of six months from the date each record was made — and the definition of supporting records is wide, reaching payroll and settlement sheets, government-issued location records, bills of lading and itineraries showing the origin and destination of each trip, fuelling and servicing records, and dispatch or trip records showing arrival and departure times. Retention for logs is covered separately in the inspection cycle only insofar as the two record sets get filed together, which they should not be.
The obligation is to keep the record and produce it, and in British Columbia to keep “the original” of a trip inspection report for at least three months, so a carrier using electronic capture should keep the underlying signed record in whatever form the rule specifies and be able to produce it on demand. Where the report is generated and signed electronically from the outset, Ontario’s treatment of electronic signatures and of electronic records as evidence is the relevant background.
In British Columbia, six months after disposal — unless the buyer consented to take the records, in which case the buyer holds them. Nothing stops you keeping a copy, and for anything connected to a collision or a claim you should.
No. The inspection facility’s 18-month retention duty is the facility’s. If the shop closes, changes hands or simply cannot find it, the carrier is still the one holding an incomplete vehicle file.
Retention failures are almost never a decision to destroy something. They are a filing habit: reports that arrive as photographs in a dispatcher’s phone, invoices filed by vendor rather than by unit, and a driver’s twenty-day window to hand in a report that nobody is counting. Capturing each report against a unit number the day it arrives, flagging any report that carries an uncleared defect, and holding the whole set for the longest applicable period turns an audit from a search into a query.
A 30-minute call is enough to see how inspection reports, defects and repair orders could file themselves against the right unit.
