Two situations, not five. Here is what section 82 requires on the grid, and the malfunction procedure that has to run alongside it.
Key takeaways
A Canadian driver may still keep a paper daily log in exactly two situations, both set out in section 81(1) of the Commercial Vehicle Drivers Hours of Service Regulations: when the driver is operating under one of the ELD carve-outs in section 77(1) — a permit, an exemption under the Act, a rental of 30 days or less, or a vehicle built before model year 2000 — or when the ELD is displaying a malfunction or data diagnostic code from Table 4 of Schedule 2 of the Technical Standard.
Everything else that looks like a paper-log exemption is really the 160 km provision in section 81(2), which is not a licence to keep a paper log. It replaces the log with a different record entirely.
Section 82 is prescriptive, and roadside enforcement reads it literally. At the beginning of each day the driver enters, legibly, on the grid set out in Schedule 2: the date and the start time if it is not midnight; the driver’s name and the names of any co-drivers; the cycle being followed, unless driving under an oil well service vehicle permit; the vehicle licence plates or unit numbers; the odometer reading of each vehicle driven; the names and addresses of the home terminal and the principal place of business of every carrier the driver will work for that day; the preceding 14 days of off-duty and on-duty hours if the driver was not previously required to keep a record; and a deferral declaration under section 16 where one applies.
Through the day the driver draws a continuous line between time markers for each duty status, names the municipality and province where each change occurred — or the highway number and nearest kilometre marker, service plaza or intersection plus the nearest municipality — and totals the hours in each status to 24. At the end of the day the driver records the totals, the distance driven excluding personal use, the closing odometer, and signs the record certifying it.
British Columbia’s intra-provincial version, section 37.48 of Division 37 of B.C.’s Motor Vehicle Act Regulations, is drafted in almost the same terms, so a carrier operating on both sides of the federal-provincial line is not maintaining two formats.
This is why section 77(7)(d) requires the vehicle to carry enough blank records of duty status for the driver to record at least 15 days. A fleet that has stripped the paper out of its trucks has created a compliance failure that only shows up on the worst possible day.
Worked example: a two-truck owner-operator running under a carrier
An owner-operator hauling under a Winnipeg carrier’s authority loses the ELD signal on a Tuesday outside Kenora. He parks, calls dispatch, writes the code and the times into the day’s grid, and starts a paper log.
What makes this go well is that the truck carried blank grids and he knew the section 82 fields. What makes it go badly for the carrier is the register: nobody opened one, so when the device was swapped nine days later there was no record of the dates, the drivers who used the truck in between, or the action taken.
The carrier is the party section 78(6) names. If you engage owner-operators, the malfunction register is your obligation, not theirs — and how tightly you direct their day feeds a separate legal question about employee versus contractor classification that is worth settling in writing before it is settled for you.
Possession: section 84 requires the driver to carry the records of duty status for the preceding 14 days, the current day’s record completed up to the last change in duty status, and any supporting documents received during the current trip. For a driver under an oil well service vehicle permit, it is the records covering the three required periods of 24 consecutive off-duty hours in any 24 days.
Forwarding: section 85(1) gives the driver 20 days from completing a record to forward it with its supporting documents to the home terminal, and requires the carrier to ensure the driver does so. Where a driver worked for more than one carrier in a day, section 85(2) sends the original paper record to the home terminal of the last carrier and a copy to each of the others.
One log per day: section 86(1) prohibits a carrier from allowing, and a driver from keeping, more than one record of duty status for any day. Section 86(2) prohibits entering inaccurate information or falsifying, mutilating, obscuring, altering, deleting, destroying or defacing a record or a supporting document. Under section 91(3)(d) a contravention of section 86 carries a 72-hour out-of-service declaration, which continues past 72 hours until the record is rectified.
A paper log is not free just because the device is absent. Someone has to receive it, read it against fuel receipts and bills of lading, catch the exceptions, and file it in chronological order by driver. Section 87 requires the carrier to monitor each driver’s compliance and to record the dates of non-compliance and the remedial action taken — and a shoebox does not do that.
This is the least glamorous and most automatable part of a small carrier’s back office: scanning grids, extracting the fields, comparing them to supporting documents and drafting the exception note. The extraction and the draft can be machine work; the determination that a driver was non-compliant, and the remedial action, are signed by a person.
No. Section 77(1) obliges the carrier to equip each commercial vehicle with a certified ELD unless one of the four listed situations applies. Preference is not one of them.
The carrier deposits records of duty status and supporting documents at its principal place of business within 30 days of receiving them and keeps them in chronological order for each driver for at least six months after receipt (s.85(3)).
Section 98(3) requires the driver, on request, to give an inspector a copy of the paper records and supporting documents for the current day and the preceding 14 days, or the originals where copying is not possible, and the inspector issues a receipt in the form set out in Schedule 3. Keeping legible originals is the safe practice; how you retain and produce operational imagery is a question Treadstone Law addresses in the context of dashcam and surveillance footage.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself in your back office.
