Good morning. Regulatory loopholes are allowing predatory companies to leave truck drivers across the country vulnerable. More on our investigation into the trucking sector below, along with a Canadian warship’s defiance and Ottawa’s Ebola assistance. But first:

• A PEI family has sued the provincial government over forever chemical contamination in their drinking water
• Kenneth Law is expected to admit shipping toxic substances to people in Ontario, and the U.K., aiding suicides
• Israel struck a Beirut suburb ahead of ceasefire negotiations in Washington. Meanwhile, Netanyahu will expand control of Gaza to 70 per cent

Hi, I’m Sara Mojtehedzadeh, a reporter on The Globe’s investigations team.

On a Saturday afternoon last November, I jumped on the highway and headed for Brampton, Ont., to attend a town hall. Held above a hockey rink in Canada’s logistics heartland, the event was a place for truck drivers to vent. And on that wintery weekend, the agenda was long.

Trucking was once the path to a middle-class life in Canada. It’s also how the vast majority of products that you and I consume get on the shelves. But as I listened to drivers speak, it was clear the toll this job can take. Long hours on the road spark familial strain, loneliness and stress.

Now imagine you only get paid for a fraction of that work. Like Raminderjit Singh, who drove 29,000 kilometres over the course of two months, but was paid just $1,000.

For the better part of a year, my colleague, Globe data editor Mahima Singh and I investigated the many concerns raised by drivers and experts, from wage theft to safety lapses. What we found was an industry where bad actors often escape scrutiny, even though their actions can profoundly affect the lives of their workers and the public.

To tell this story, we filed more than 30 freedom-of-information requests, analyzed datasets from transport regulators across the country, and conducted interviews with more than 20 drivers and industry insiders.

One of the symptoms of weak enforcement is the rise of an illegal business model known as employee misclassification. It involves falsely treating drivers as though they’re self-employed, a category of worker with no basic rights under the federal labour laws that currently govern cross-country trucking.

This issue frustrates not just drivers who find themselves shortchanged, but trucking firms that say they’re being forced to compete with companies that use the illegal practice to slash payroll costs.

Just how pervasive is this business model? That’s part of what our investigation set out to uncover.

The scale of misclassification in trucking isn’t easy to precisely quantify. But we made a custom census data request to chart the rise of own-account self-employment in trucking, which experts believe provides clues about the practice. Over the course of the 2010s, it significantly expanded across the country. In some areas, the increase to the number of drivers in this category was more than 300 per cent.

Meanwhile, drivers in some cities saw their earnings drop to the poverty line. And when employers don’t pay drivers’ wages at all, the complaints system often fails them, our investigation found.

All of this raises safety concerns, not just for truck drivers, but for everyone on the roads.

Research shows that low wages and job uncertainty are linked to poor safety outcomes. As precarious work becomes increasingly common, advocates argue that not enough is being done to scrutinize trucking firms. After analyzing thousands of trucking firms in four provinces, we found only a fraction have ever received an in-depth safety audit.

Ottawa has already taken action – for example, by ramping up CRA scrutiny of trucking firms’ payments to contractors, and launching inspection blitzes of GTA-area trucking firms. Will this be enough to tackle the scale of the problem? Not everyone is convinced. As one driver advocate told me, “companies are making up their own rules.”

By the time I left the town hall that Saturday in November, it was dusk and the snow was starting to swirl. I was late to relieve my dad of babysitting duties and get my toddler’s bedtime routine underway – a time crunch that would usually inspire in me an unfortunate urge to defy the speed limit.

But as I drove down the highway, flanked by big rigs, I thought about the faith we all put in each other to responsibly use this shared resource – our roads.

This investigation will hopefully give you a small window into the pressures some truckers are under as they strive to do that. It also raises bigger questions: about the rules governing our transportation sector, how they’re enforced – and who pays when the system breaks down.