Accident Awareness: Ontario program back in our schools

Grade 10 and 11 students at College Sainte-Anne and College Saint-Louis in Lachine learned how to stay safe on and around the road this week, thanks to a program from Ontario.

For three years now, Accident Awareness has visited Quebec in an effort to educate youth about road safety. In the two weeks that the not-for-profit program is presented, there will be 14 presentations that reach 1,500 students this year.

“Liars! Liars!” shouted the students in the audience at the Vanguard Intercultural High School presentation in Saint-Laurent when only one or two teens raised their hands to say that they sometimes didn’t buckle their seatbelts.

More than 90 per cent of people in Quebec wear their seatbelts, according to the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ), yet each year more than 30 per cent of the drivers and passengers killed in traffic accidents didn’t buckle up. On average, 80 people are killed annually while not wearing one, and 190 seriously injured. Wearing a seatbelt can avoid 40 deaths per year.

Cellphones

Retired Ontario police officer Bob Annan, who co-founded the program in 1993, urged students to “survive the day,” with tips on things they could change immediately, like crossing at intersections or not looking at a cellphone while crossing the street.

The morning capped off in the parking lot with a viewing of the crashed car of a 19-year-old who died last year texting while driving at 141 km/h. Dash cam videos of traffic accidents helped students to see the consequences of driving not only impaired, but distracted.

“Cellphones are a huge problem,” said Annan, who started the program when he realised how little basic information people knew about road safety. Distractions have become as big a problem as driving while impaired, he explained.

In Quebec, traffic accidents resulted in 36,151 victims in 2014, the latest data from the SAAQ. Of those victims, 336 died and 1,573 were seriously injured. The numbers are down 4.9 per cent from 2013, and 12 per cent over a five-year average.

While there is no excuse for texting while driving, or not buckling your seatbelt, Annan said the most common excuses when intercepted are that “I just unbuckled it to get my wallet,” or, simply, “I wasn’t texting.”

The program was brought to Quebec in collaboration with the SPVM. The French presentations are led by Diane Belzile, an agent of road safety unit for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

In the future, Annan would like to see the program here on a permanent basis.  “Everything is the same. People die the same way no matter what province you’re in.”

Accident Awareness is at College Saint-Louis on May 4 and College Sainte-Anne de Lachine on May 6.