Calgary's Police Chief Wants English-Only Driver Tests — Alberta's Transportation Minister Is Listening
Chief Katie McLellan says it plainly: if you can't read English road signs, how can you pass a driving test? Alberta Minister Devin Dreeshen is asking the same question — and the answer affects every driver on Alberta's roads.
June 12, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Calgary, Alberta · Community · 9 min read
A Question Nobody Wanted to Ask Out Loud
Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen is not a politician who shrinks from a pointed question.
The fifth-generation Albertan and UCP MLA has been reviewing driver testing standards in the province — a system that, by his own assessment, has grown too accommodating and too easy to pass. Among the questions he is now putting to Albertans: should the province's driver knowledge test be in English only?
It's the kind of question that causes a certain type of person to reach immediately for words like 'discrimination' and 'xenophobia.' Dreeshen is not bothered. Neither is the most senior law enforcement official in Alberta's largest city.
Katie McLellan, Calgary's police chief, did not hesitate when Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell posed the question to her directly.
"You have to be able to read English signs, Rick. If you can't read English how can you pass a driving test?"
In Alberta, as it stands today, you can. The province currently offers the driver knowledge test in 25 languages via audio headphones. If your language is not among the 25, you can bring a personal translator. The test before the road test — the written portion that is supposed to confirm you understand Alberta's rules of the road — can be taken without reading or understanding a single word of English.
Dreeshen wants Albertans to decide if that still makes sense.
What Chief McLellan Said — And What She Means
McLellan has been Calgary's police chief since May 2025, sworn in following the unexpected resignation of former Chief Mark Neufeld. She is 57, originally from Scotland, and spent her first two years in Calgary working in the city's 911 call centre before becoming a sworn CPS officer at age 20. Her career spans nearly four decades — patrol, professional standards, criminal operations, and executive leadership — and she was confirmed to continue as chief through mid-2028.
She is not someone who makes reckless statements. When Bell presented Dreeshen's proposal, McLellan's position was direct and unambiguous.
"Anything we can do to get better drivers we support," she told Bell.
She continued: "You have to understand the rules of the road and what the expectations are. As we've always said, it's not a right to get a driver's licence. It's a privilege."
That framing — licence as privilege, not right — is the foundation of her argument. Alberta roads are governed by English-language signs. Stop signs, speed limits, merge warnings, yield markers, school zone notices, construction detours: every regulatory and informational sign a driver encounters in Alberta is written in English. A driver who cannot read English is operating in a fundamental information vacuum every time they pass a sign.
McLellan has been explicit about Calgary's road safety situation on a broader level, describing driving behaviour in the city as 'atrocious' and flagging the volume of traffic collisions as a priority file for the CPS. Her endorsement of Dreeshen's question is not abstract policy commentary — it comes from a chief watching collision numbers climb year over year in Canada's fastest-growing major city.
What Alberta Currently Allows
The current accommodation system is more extensive than most Albertans realize.
If you have difficulty with English and want to take the Alberta Class 7 driver knowledge test, you have multiple options. You can bring a paper dictionary to convert questions from English to your language as you go. If you do not know English at all, you can put on a set of headphones at the registry office and have the questions and all answer choices read aloud to you in one of 25 languages.
If your language is not among the 25, you may bring a personal translator to your first attempt.
The languages currently available via the audio system include French, Punjabi, Tagalog, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Ukrainian, Amharic, Somali, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, Persian (Farsi), Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Tigrinya, Oromo, Nepali, Dutch, and Cree — a list that reflects decades of incremental expansion, not a single deliberate policy choice.
It is worth noting what the province does not offer this accommodation for. Commercial driver licences — Class 1 (semi-trucks), Class 2 (buses), Class 3 (trucks), and Class 4 (taxis and emergency vehicles) — are already English-only. The provincial government has already determined that professional drivers need to read English. The multilingual audio option applies only to Class 5 (regular passenger) and Class 7 (learner) licences.
A randomly selected registry office in Calgary, as Dreeshen has noted, explicitly advertises that you do not need to worry if you don't speak or comprehend English. The province has built and promoted this system as a feature.
Who Changed the Policy — And When
Alberta's driver knowledge test was not always available in 25 languages. For most of Alberta's history as a province, the knowledge test was conducted in English, with French accommodated in recognition of Canada's federal bilingualism framework.
The expansion beyond English and French began in earnest under Premier Ed Stelmach's Progressive Conservative government. Around 2007, then-Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette announced that the driver knowledge test would be available in nine languages, citing the need to better serve Alberta's rapidly growing immigrant population during the province's sustained oil-boom-driven immigration wave.
Ouellette framed the expansion as a practical accessibility measure. The announcement was made quietly, with limited public debate. The test was subsequently expanded to ten languages — and has grown to 25 under successive governments.
Neither the PC governments that followed Stelmach (Alison Redford, Dave Hancock, Jim Prentice), nor the NDP government under Rachel Notley, nor the UCP governments under Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith, ever reduced the language list or publicly re-examined the policy.
Devin Dreeshen is the first Transportation Minister in nearly two decades to put the question directly to Albertans — and the first to have the support of a Calgary police chief in doing it.
The Road Safety Case
The public safety argument for English-only testing is straightforward: Alberta's roads are governed in English, and drivers need to read English to navigate them.
Every regulatory sign — stop, yield, speed limit, school zone, merge, no entry, wrong way, hazard warning — is written in English. The Traffic Safety Act, which governs driver behaviour in Alberta, is written in English. Road construction notices, detour instructions, emergency alerts, and posted highway warnings are written in English. Emergency services communicate in English.
Alberta's road safety numbers underscore why this matters. The province recorded 297 traffic fatalities in 2023 — up from 268 in 2022, a 10.8 percent increase in a single year. Fatal collisions rose 8.4 percent year over year. Major injury collisions climbed 6.6 percent. In Calgary specifically, 2024 marked the highest number of fatal road collisions in over a decade.
No provincial study has isolated language proficiency as a specific variable in collision statistics. But McLellan's argument does not require a study. It rests on a simpler observation: a driver who cannot read the signs governing the road they are on is missing critical safety information on every trip. The knowledge test, by definition, should confirm that a new driver understands those signs. A test conducted in a language other than English cannot fully confirm that.
Calgary's collision statistics do not tell us how many accidents involved drivers who could not read English. They tell us accidents are up, roads are getting deadlier, and that the city's police chief believes current standards are inadequate.
Dreeshen's Broader Push on Driver Standards
The English-language question is part of a larger review. Dreeshen has put several issues on the table, including the overall difficulty of the knowledge and road tests, the standards applied by third-party registry testing facilities, and whether the current system produces drivers who are genuinely prepared for Alberta conditions — including winter driving, high-speed rural highways, and complex urban intersections.
Alberta's driver testing system has a complicated history. The province privatized testing to registry agents in the 1990s, generating long-running concerns about consistency of standards and the incentive dynamics of private testing facilities. The government partially reversed that decision for certain tests. Overall test difficulty — and the quality of newly licensed drivers — has been a recurring complaint from both the Calgary and Edmonton police services.
Dreeshen has framed his review as a common-sense question about whether Alberta is licensing drivers who are ready for Alberta's roads. McLellan's support is significant precisely because it comes from someone whose officers are on those roads every day, writing up collision reports and attending fatal accidents.
"Anything we can do to get better drivers we support," she told the Sun. That line should be read as more than an endorsement of a language policy. It is a statement from the chief of police that the current standard is not producing the results Calgarians need.
The Conservative Case for the Standard
The argument for English-only driver testing is not an argument against immigration, and it should not be caricatured as one. Alberta has always been a province built by people who came from somewhere else — from the Ukrainian settlers of the parkland to the Punjabi community of Calgary's northeast to the Filipino healthcare workers in every hospital in the province. The communities that built this province came from every language group that now appears on the knowledge test's audio list.
The argument is simpler than that: if the road system is administered in English, a basic standard of English literacy is a legitimate prerequisite for operating a vehicle within it.
Other provinces operate this way. Ontario, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan offer the knowledge test in English and French — Canada's two official languages — with limited interpreter accommodations on a case-by-case basis. Alberta's 25-language standing policy is an outlier in the Canadian context.
Canada's constitution requires bilingual federal services but does not obligate provinces to offer services in any language beyond their official language. Alberta's official language is English. The current multilingual driver testing policy is entirely discretionary — something the government chose to expand over two decades of quiet policy drift, never with a public mandate to do so.
Chief McLellan's position reflects a conservative value with deep roots in Alberta: this province holds a standard, asks something of the people who come here, and does not apologize for that. A driver's licence is not a welcome gift extended to new residents. It is a certification issued on behalf of every other person on the road — pedestrians, cyclists, other drivers, children walking to school.
If you want to drive on Alberta's English-language roads, reading English is not an unreasonable place to start.
Key takeaways
- Calgary Police Chief Katie McLellan publicly backed making Alberta's driver knowledge test English-only, stating: 'You have to be able to read English signs. If you can't read English how can you pass a driving test?'
- Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen (UCP) is actively reviewing driver testing standards, including whether the knowledge test should be English-only
- Alberta currently offers the driver knowledge test in 25 languages via audio headphones — plus allows personal translators for languages not on the list
- The multilingual policy was introduced under Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette during Premier Ed Stelmach's PC government around 2007, beginning with nine languages
- No government — PC, NDP, or UCP — has ever reduced the language list or publicly reviewed the policy in the nearly 20 years since it was introduced
- Commercial driver tests (Class 1–4) are already English-only; the multilingual accommodation applies only to Class 5 and Class 7 passenger vehicle licences
- Alberta recorded 297 traffic fatalities in 2023, up 10.8% from 268 in 2022; Calgary's 2024 fatal collision count was the highest in over a decade
- Every regulatory road sign in Alberta — stop, yield, speed limits, school zones, construction warnings — is posted in English only
Frequently asked questions
- Who is Katie McLellan and why is her opinion significant here?
- Katie McLellan is the Chief of the Calgary Police Service, sworn in May 2025. She immigrated to Calgary from Scotland and joined the CPS in 1987 at age 20, following two years working in the city's 911 call centre. With nearly four decades in policing and direct responsibility for traffic safety enforcement across a city of 1.4 million, she is one of the most credible voices in Alberta on road safety. She has been confirmed as chief through mid-2028.
- Who first expanded Alberta's driver test to multiple languages, and when?
- The expansion from English and French to multiple languages was initiated by Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette under Premier Ed Stelmach's Progressive Conservative government, around 2007. The province announced the test would be available in nine languages, citing accessibility for Alberta's growing immigrant population during the oil-boom era. No subsequent government — PC, NDP, or UCP — has reversed or reduced the language list. It has since grown from nine to 25 languages.
- What languages is the Alberta driver knowledge test currently offered in?
- As of 2026, the Class 7 (learner's) knowledge test is available in 25 languages via audio headphones: English, French, Punjabi, Tagalog, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Ukrainian, Amharic, Somali, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, Persian (Farsi), Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Tigrinya, Oromo, Nepali, Dutch, and Cree. For languages not on the list, applicants may bring a personal translator on their first attempt.
- What is Devin Dreeshen actually proposing?
- Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen has raised the question of whether the driver knowledge test should be available in English only, as part of a broader review of Alberta's driver testing standards. He has indicated he is 'leaning' toward tightening testing requirements. No legislation has been introduced. The question has been framed as a public consultation item — asking Albertans whether the current level of accommodation is appropriate.
- Are commercial driver tests already English-only in Alberta?
- Yes. Tests for Class 1 (semi-trucks), Class 2 (buses), Class 3 (trucks), and Class 4 (taxis and emergency vehicles) licences are conducted in English only. The province has already determined that professional drivers must demonstrate English proficiency. The 25-language audio option applies exclusively to Class 5 (standard passenger vehicle) and Class 7 (learner's) licences.
- Is an English-only requirement constitutional?
- Yes. Canada's constitution requires bilingual (English and French) services from the federal government, but provinces are not constitutionally required to offer services beyond their own official language. Alberta's official language is English, and French language services are provided in certain limited provincial contexts under separate provincial legislation. The current 25-language driver test policy is entirely discretionary — not constitutionally required — and can be changed by the provincial government at any time.
- How does Alberta's policy compare to other provinces?
- Alberta's 25-language standing policy is an outlier among Canadian provinces. Ontario, British Columbia, and most other provinces offer the knowledge test in English and French — Canada's two official languages — with limited case-by-case translator accommodations. Alberta's practice of offering 25-language audio testing as a standard service, and actively advertising it to applicants, is not matched by any other major province.
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