Canoe trips sure have changed
Just staying at home would be much safer
The notion all accidental deaths can be prevented is as common when it comes to drowning as it is in any other way to die. From what we know of Jeremiah Perry’s death in Algonquin Park last summer, however, his death was jawdroppingly preventable.
The 15-year-old student at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate in Toronto, part of the Toronto District School Board, was required to have passed a swim test in order to go on the canoe trip from which he didn’t return. He had failed it, as had half the kids in the group. Jeremiah went swimming. He drowned.
The mind boggles. One of the teachers on the trip, Nicholas Mills, has been charged with criminal negligence causing death.
To my eyes, the TDSB’s response was quite curious. It assured the public that henceforth students heading out on canoe trips must pass one swimming test in the city, then another on site. If they don’t pass, they don’t go. But even if they do pass, at no point during the canoe trip will any student be allowed to swim without a lifejacket. Instead they may bob up and down in the water if professionals deem it safe. Perhaps they might even splash each other.
Whee. Imagine the poetry it will inspire.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Evidently the policy had not been universally applied, but apparently it was in effect at most if not all Ontario schools well before Jeremiah’s tragic death.
“I think what happens is every time there is an incident, whether it’s a fatality or not, or a near-miss, then we’ve kind of upped the ante a little bit,” says an expert in risk management for schools, who asked to speak anonymously so as not to associate her views with her employer. “It’s … the precautionary principle. We’re looking to be prudent in the safety of our students, knowing that we are in loco parentis and (we) are accountable for our actions.
“And so it’s important that we go to the highest level of safety. And if that means wearing life jackets — even though the chances of something happening are very remote — I’m prepared to do that.”
Perhaps you could argue that schools in general, or public schools in particular, have a special duty or lack of expertise that means they should insist on extreme, entirely inflexible levels of safety — say, prohibiting a 16-year-old nationally certified lifeguard from swimming at a campsite without a life-jacket.
I couldn’t, but perhaps you could.
But it has gone well beyond that. I was amazed to learn the same basic policies are in effect at summer camps as well. Ontario Regulation 503/17, made under the Health Protection and Promotion Act, stipulates strict requirements for swimming at camps: approved areas must be clearly delineated with markers and buoys; first aid kits must include at least 20 identified items, including “sterile gauze pads, each 75 millimetres square”; a phone must be near to hand; at least two lifeguards must be present, even to guard a single swimmer.
Only under those circumstances can kids actually go swimming in a lake without a life-jacket — or as we fogeys call it, “swimming.”
In theory, says Eric Shendelman, president of the Ontario Camps Association, organizers of a canoe trip might apply the same principles and allow swimming without life jackets at a campsite. In practice, however, he says the association “highly recommends” camps simply insist on life jackets.
“Just like seat belts in a car, it’s becoming more of a norm that everybody wear a life-jacket in water in any activity outside of a swimming area, where they should be learning to swim and developing their swimming skills and strokes — “cause they’re not doing that at canoe or kayak,” says Shendelman. “It’s just an added step for safety.”
I’m not defending the old days. When I was a camper, life jackets in canoes were for resting your knees on. We changed up paddlers in the middle of stormy lakes. We jumped off cliffs so high that hitting the water felt like being punched simultaneously in the stomach and the jaw.
Somewhere between there and here, we seem to have bobbed on the current past sanity. Surely it’s behind us if certified outdoor educators, counsellors and guides, knowing the body of water and the kids and their swimming abilities, can’t safely supervise a dip in a lake.
Like Shendelman, the risk-management expert draws a distinction between canoe tripping and recreational swimming. She is cheerfully unmoved by my suggestion that proper canoe tripping often includes jumping in the water after a long hot day. “There’s probably less jumping in lakes these days than you would imagine,” she says.
Oof. Quite a world we’ve made. And grown-ups here are modelling risk-management techniques that seem sure to perpetuate the cycle. A 15-year-old boy who couldn’t swim drowned, and now 15-year-olds who can swim aren’t allowed to. If that’s a rational safety response, how do we argue against banning all swimming without life jackets everywhere? Or for going on canoe trips at all? Staying home is a hell of a lot safer.