Mother urging training after son’s death
SASKATOON Myles Denora Labrecque had been riding dirt bikes for a decade when he decided to buy his first ATV — never imagining his first ATV ride would be his last.
On Oct. 8, 2017, from provinces away, his mother, Ngaire Denora, got the call that her son had been in an accident.
Denora flew from her home in Quebec to Regina, where she spent the next two and a half weeks near her 24-year-old son in the General Hospital. Labrecque had suffered two traumatic brain injuries and never regained consciousness. Denora made the difficult decision to take her son off life support.
Since then, Denora has been advocating for mandatory ATV safety training in both Saskatchewan and Quebec. She believes if her son had been trained, he might still be alive.
“It’s like it still happened yesterday for me. You know, we’re all devastated by it, and for me it’s so angering and frustrating because it was a preventable accident,” she said.
Labrecque, who was living near Kipling, in southeast Saskatchewan, was a welder and an experienced dirt biker. On the day he bought his first ATV, he and a friend decided to go for a ride. Denora believes Labrecque was riding in a ditch alongside a fence when he found he couldn’t get out of the ditch. He eventually hit a fence post.
He was wearing a helmet, riding in the daytime, and he hadn’t been drinking or speeding, Denora said. She attributed the accident solely to his lack of ATV experience.
“Myles was no stranger to anything with wheels and a motor. But … his biggest liability was a lack of experience,” she said.
“On a quad, you have to really fight with the quad to go where you want it to go, and it’s a completely different ride.”
In the 18 months that she’s been advocating for mandatory training, Denora has yet to see any government movement in either province.
“It’s frustrating in the sense that the government seems to think that they have it all tied up in a neat little bundle,” she said.
In Saskatchewan, ATV safety training is recommended but not mandatory, said SGI media relations manager Tyler Mcmurchy.
“We do highly recommend that new riders take a training course before operating an ATV, and they are also beneficial for experienced riders who want to refresh their skills,” he said.
However, making training mandatory would prove challenging. Most ATV rides occur on private property, where enforcement would be next to impossible, and riding is not regulated by the All Terrain Vehicles Act, Mcmurchy said.
The number of ATV instructors across the province would also have to grow substantially to make mandatory training accessible to everyone.
Even incentivizing safety training, as the province does with motorcycle training, would be complicated. There is no driver’s licence endorsement for ATVS like there is for motorcycles, so ATV riders don’t have to go through SGI for anything.
But Denora believes training is needed for riders to recognize how dangerous the machines are.
“They look like toys, and it’s this whole mentality around them,” she said. “Mandatory safety training doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be accidents, that somebody won’t die, but at least give people an idea of the reality of the machine that they’re dealing with.”
In 2017, the year of the most recent collision statistics from SGI, 16 people were injured and three killed in 26 collisions involving ATVS on public roads or lands.
Mcmurchy noted that those statistics don’t include collisions on private land, which is where many ATV accidents happen.
According to the Saskatchewan All Terrain Vehicle Association, there were eight Atv-related fatalities and 47 injuries in the province in 2013.
The Saskatchewan Prevention Institute website says 15-to-19year-olds have the highest rate of hospitalizations from Atv-related injuries in Canada, with 20-to-24year-olds coming in second.
Mcmurchy agrees that people need to recognize the potential danger of ATVS.
“They are a recreational vehicle, of course, but they are also very powerful machines,” he said. “They’re definitely not toys and … that’s a message that needs to get out there.”
Denora created a Facebook group called Quad Squad Quebec and has started an outreach program in which she goes into her local schools and talks to students about ATV safety.
Ultimately, she hopes increased safety awareness will spare another family the pain she has experienced.
“The right thing is to give people the knowledge that they need to be safe,” she said.