IRP in Quebec: Apportioned Registration, Fees and the Distance Schedule

In Quebec, apportioned registration is handled by the SAAQ, which is a point of confusion for carriers used to dealing with Revenu Québec for IFTA. The two credentials come from two agencies: the SAAQ issues the apportioned plate and cab card, Revenu Québec issues the IFTA licence and decals, and a Quebec carrier that lets one lapse will hear about it from the other. A Montreal or Quebec City fleet that runs into Ontario, or south through Lacolle and Stanstead into New York and Vermont, is interjurisdictional from its first trip and registers under IRP with the SAAQ as its base jurisdiction.

The threshold is the Plan's: a power unit over 26,000 pounds gross or registered weight, or with three or more axles, or in a combination over 26,000 pounds, operating in two or more member jurisdictions. Trailers are not apportioned; they carry an ordinary plate and travel on the power unit's cab card.

The fee is the sum of every jurisdiction's registration fee for the vehicle's weight class, each weighted by the fleet's percentage of distance there over the twelve months ending June 30 before the registration year. Registered weight is the largest lever, and the distance split is the second.

Quebec's freight geography puts most of a fleet's distance in a handful of jurisdictions: Quebec itself, Ontario on the 401 and 417 corridors, and New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine for the cross-border runs. The IRP renewal wants the exact split, in kilometres, for the July-to-June reporting year, and the difference between an estimated 70/20/10 and a measured 63/24/13 is real money on the apportioned fee. Telematics logs each truck's position continuously, and MyGeotab's distance-by-jurisdiction report produces the schedule the SAAQ application asks for, in the units it asks for, without a driver's trip sheets.

At the roadside, Contrôle routier Québec checks the cab card against the plate and the registered weight, and a Quebec truck in Vermont or New York is checked the same way by state officers. The SAAQ can audit the distance behind an application for three years after the registration year closes; the GPS trip logs behind the report are what answer that audit in an afternoon. Fleets that hold Quebec IRP, Quebec IFTA and a Canadian-certified ELD from one device keep all three current from one dataset.

The base jurisdiction can audit the distance behind an application for three years after the registration year closes, and asks for trip-level distance by jurisdiction tied to a unit and a date. GPS trip logs behind a distance report answer that; reconstructed trip sheets get the fee recalculated.