Hard questions need to be asked in wake of Humboldt tragedy

Coroner’s inquest could prevent history from repeating itself, writes Richard Foot.

“There are no accidents. I don’t even know what the word means. And I never trust anyone who says he does.”

So says Mitchell Stephens, the lawyer in The Sweet Hereafter, the haunting novel about a small town that loses its children in a deadly school bus crash. Stephens is a provocative character in the book, but the uncomfortable truth he proclaims is an important one — especially this week in Saskatchewan.

As Canadians mourn in solidarity with the shattered hockey families of the Humboldt Broncos, the one thing we must not do is think of this as a random accident.

It won’t help the grieving community of Humboldt, it won’t serve the memory of the 15 people whose lives were lost, and most importantly, it won’t protect others from future tragedy.

A decade ago, the small city of Bathurst, N.B., was convulsed by shock and grief after a highway crash killed eight people, including seven boys on the Bathurst High School basketball team. Driving home from an out-oftown game, the team van collided with a transport truck on a quiet country highway.

Once the public funerals were over, the families of the dead boys found themselves in two opposing camps: those who believed the disaster could have been avoided and wanted a measure of accountability, and those who preferred to mourn their sons in peace, who considered the crash a random tragedy.

One dynamic, which doesn’t appear to be a factor in Humboldt, is that the driver who lost control of the Bathurst High van was the team’s coach. Although he survived, he lost his wife in the crash. He was a popular teacher at Bathurst High, where some of the grieving parents were also teachers and former students.

In fact, Bathurst High was such a respected local institution, with so many devoted alumni, that the community was reluctant to imagine that its beloved high school might have overlooked basic safety guidelines — failing, for example, to equip the team van with winter tires before sending it out, packed with kids, onto an icy highway at night.

Transport Canada and the RCMP investigated the collision, but despite shocking official findings about the poor mechanical condition of the van and its unsafe operation, neither agency found fault or laid blame.

In the wake of the crash, the province banned 15-passenger vans, like the Bathurst High vehicle, from transporting students. Beyond that single measure, neither the school district nor any government authority took action to fundamentally tighten safety procedures or significantly alter the way children are transported to school events.

It fell to three of Bathurst’s grieving mothers to demand change. After years of insisting that their sons did not die in an accident, they forced various governments to hold an inquest, toughen up winter tire practices, and issue national standards for extracurricular transportation.

We don’t yet know what investigators will find in Saskatchewan. But a decade ago, Bathurst proved that tragedy happens in a vacuum. People die when organizations, governments and communities become captive to the status quo, lulled into complacency by the accepted way of doing things.

Six people died at the same Saskatchewan intersection in 1997. The provincial government is reviewing the crossroads once again. That’s not enough.

The province should hold a coroner’s inquest into the latest carnage to generate a full set of recommendations, including new rules for trucks and buses approaching rural crossroads from all directions.

Critics will say governments can’t make the world perfectly safe — that accidents do happen.

Would that response satisfy the seven teenage boys, now lying in their graves in Bathurst? Or the young men and boys, on the cusp of their adult lives, who died in Saskatchewan?

Accidents don’t happen. Tragedy happens when, in the wake of loss and mourning, we move on without asking hard questions, not for the sake of retribution, but for safety.

Speaking out requires courage, especially in small towns consumed by sorrow. But the loss of so many young people compels us to do better.