Kids on school buses deserve protection
Re: “Lethbridge Herald, Jan. 29, “Girl in serious condition after school bus crash.”
This little girl was rushed via air ambulance to a Calgary hospital to have her “serious” but not “life threatening” injuries attended to, while politicos in Ottawa debate whether or not to install restraining devices in tin boxes on wheels transporting our children. This should be a no brainer. Heavy fines are applied to moms and dads failing to ensure their kids are belted properly into the family vehicle, transporting them to school, but later when the same kids leave in a bus on a field trip, often at highway speeds, there are no restraining devices and no law requiring them — why is that?
If someone converts that same school bus into a private motorhome, the law states the builder (whether home builder or major manufacturer) must install sufficient numbers of seatbelts as there are seats to sit people on that conveyance. Cost never enters that discussion. Seems nutty to me there’s a rule for every other motorized vehicle in existence using our roadways and not one for vehicles painted yellow with school bus written on the side.
Federal Minister of Transportation Marc Garneau, like everyone before him, is dragging his feet on this matter. After 125 years transporting our precious resource in these things, and loss of life, the best Garneau can do is announce the appointment of “a task force to look at retrofitting school buses with seatbelts.” In Canada you can’t take your newborn out of a hospital without an inspection ensuring the appropriate size and date child’s seat is properly installed and six years later the six-year-old rides the big yellow tin box on a field trip, unrestrained. How insane!
The government hopes to “expand their evidence base” and “develop guidelines” figuring out how to ensure 70 kids are “buckled up properly.” Aviation figured this out decades ago — and today the plane will not leave the ground until everyone is buckled up — the pilot knowing who is or isn’t buckled properly. Time to act for our kids!
Alvin W. Shier
Lethbridge