Rest in Peace

The bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos hockey team collided with a truck en route to Nipawin, Sask., for a game Friday night, killing 15. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

Imagine a large prairie province in Canada with a population of one million people, where the prevailing culture is dominated by its rural, farming heritage. Where, during the last provincial election no fewer than five candidates in the 2016 election stated up front that they had in their background convictions for impaired driving.

Among those people who chose to reveal all upfront rather than having zealous reporters search out such embarrassing details about personal choices and consequences thereof was the man later elected premier of the province. He had an impaired driving conviction dating from age 18. Oh, and another driving event unrelated to driving drunk when, in 1997, he was responsible for a collision in which a woman died.

Fast forward to a bus carrying 29 young hockey players and their coaches on a rural highway on Friday, 6 April, when reaching an intersection with another unpaved but well marked highway, the bus was demolished by a semi-trailer that evidently failed to obey the stop sign, driving right through on flat terrain, in full daylight and good weather, killing 15 of those bus passengers, leaving 14 hospitalized, most in critical condition.

There are 24 members of the Humboldt Broncos, with members of the team ranging in age from 16 to 21. (Humboldt Broncos/Twitter)

Something dreadfully amiss in Saskatchewan with its attitude generally toward driving entitlements. Where drinking and driving doesn't appear to carry the stigma of preventable accidents that it does elsewhere. Not that, on this occasion, the driver of the semi-trailer was drunk, merely careless and as a result 15 young men and their mature hockey mentors travelling together to another town for a competitive game will never go home again.

Saskatchewan's rate of high fatality accidents is double that of another agricultural province, Manitoba; double the rate of British Columbia and Alberta. In fact double the national average for such critical road accidents year over year.

The accident claiming the lives of much of the Humboldt junior hockey team was yet another of a series of tragic events that left Saskatchewan and the rest of Canada in deep contemplative mourning for an "if only" preventable loss of life. Previous examination of such accident-prone intersections in a landscape that is flat, where sightlines are unobstructed, but which nonetheless are the sites of dreadful accidents, recommended amber flashing lights, turning lanes and rumble strips.

The intersection where 15 lives were violently destroyed on April 6 had those flashing lights and a stop sign, only the rumble strips were missing, though they're common on many such prairie intersections.