The Humboldt Accident - Who gets Punished?

Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, the driver of the truck involved in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash is awaiting the sentence that will be imposed upon him for the deaths of 16 young hockey players. There is no doubt that he is guilty - he has admitted to it. He plead quilty, it needs to be stated, at the first opportunity to do so. The only remaining question is how should he be punished.

Canadians need to be very clear that any sentencing will be a punishment - there is not a rehabilitation component to his incarceration. Sidhu will be deported back to India as soon as he leaves whatever prison he is sent to. He will be sentenced because he caused an accident that killed and injured people. He was not on drugs or drunk; he was not doing anything distracting; he was not over-tired; it was not intentional - he just made a mistake. The desire to hurt him, to take away his freedom to somehow alleviate the families' pain is understandable - it is just not very logical nor will it have any capacity to change the attitude of other truck drivers. It will not force the people who have the responsibility to ensure that the rules are followed - do so.

I would argue that I have driven with more truck drivers than most. I have driven with truck drivers with just a few years experience and with old grizzled veterans with forty or more years of driving time. I would never say that I know what all truck drivers are like but given the fact that I have spent hundreds of hours driving with them or hanging around truck stops, I do have a sense of how some of them think.

It would be fair to say that almost all of the truckers I have known have been irritated by the rules imposed upon them. Truck drivers get paid by the number of kilometres that they travel. Anything that prevents them from eking out a few extra kilometres is an irritant. The log sheets are, at least for me, are complicated and time-consuming. But with one exception, all of the truck drivers I have travelled with, follow the rules and fill out the sheets reasonably accurately. There is frequently some minor bending of the rules, some twisting of the truth so that they can get time off with family or get to a destination at a better time, but t is almost always inconsequential. The one exception to this general compliance with Transport Canada's rules was a young immigrant from India who picked me up just outside of North Bay heading north. He was a new driver, spoke very little English and according to him - his boss filled out the log book for him. While he did take his sleep when it was time, the next morning, he and a fellow driver switched trailers. My driver went south with a new trailer and the other driver took his trailer further north and then west. A practice that seems unusual.

Scattered across the country are weigh stations, where if they are open, trucks must pull in, be weighed so that they are not over loaded (if they are - the tucker, not the company pays the fine) and occasionally the inspectors check the log book. But, depending on how many trucks are in the lineup, it can be a time-consuming process. The inspectors have neither the time or the desire to look at every log book. Weigh stations are opened on some unknown schedule and truckers if they can, will avoid them. Having more stations open more often would perhaps be a partial preventative to accidents.

However, the owners of the companies must always know what is happening. It is inconceivable that they could have trucks on the road and not know who was not following the rules. They are supposed to check log books, to supervise their employees. And the good companies do that. Some have gone so far as to install tracking devices on all of their trucks, others have installed software that disables the truck from operating once the truck has gone the allotted number of hours. Sukhmander Singh, owner and director of Calgary-based Adesh Deol Trucking Ltd and Sidhu's employer faces eight charges related to log book mismanagement. I would bet that he will not face prison time. Yet it is the owners of these companies that hire poorly trained drivers (I assume it is because they can pay them less), allow, if not encourage them to violate the rules, create practices that do nothing to ensure that the drivers understand their responsibilities or increase their skills, nor do they adequately support them when there are problems on the road.

Sidhu caused the accident and there should be consequences for him. But his boss will walk away with -perhaps only a fine. He should shoulder far more of the cost and the consequences. Only when trucking companies are forced to be accountable for the violations of their drivers will they stop encouraging them to do so. Maybe some serious jail time or the loss of the owner's licence to operate the company will remind them of their responsibilities.

Instead of sending Sidhu to jail for 10 years and wasting over a million dollars upon his care - why doesn't he just get deported now? Being kicked out of Canada sounds like a pretty serious consequence to me.

Facebook and Birthdays

A few days I got a reminder from Facebook that it was someone's, who is on my friends list, birthday. Not surprising or abnormal. I am sure that there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of such reminders sent out every day. We all get them - I suspect that most people do what I do - we ignore them or else we send a brief greeting feeling a wee bit guilty that we had not remembered on our own. It so often feels as the birthday's wishes are not really meant. This birthday reminder system from Facebook irritates me so much that I have deleted my birth date from my profile.

What was so troublesome about this reminder is that my friend has been dead for over two years.

The person whose birthday it was last week was a dear friend - I miss her. I think about her often as I go through various activities. Surprisingly often I make reference to her in my conversations with others. I quite frequently wonder what her response would be to one of my blogs. I do not need Facebook to remind me of her birth date. I do not need a Facebook notice to remind me that she has passed on.

I know that I am not the only person who gets these types of reminders. As we all age, and more and more of our friends pass, there will be thousands of profiles of dead people floating through the Facebook world. Profiles that are never updated -frozen forever in time. As far as I know, there is no easy mechanism for anyone to delete those profiles - unless one has the individuals password.

I can understand why some family members might not want to be the one to delete the profile - it would make everything feel so permanent. It may be that friends want the individual page left up for a while so that they can reach out to mutual friends. But one has to wonder if the individual themselves would want to have their profile forever locked in a never changing vacuum. Perhaps there needs to be an addendum added to all wills instructing the executor to delete the Facebook profile or Facebook could quite simply delete profiles where there has been no activity for two years.

Paradoxically I know that I am part of the problem. All that I would have to do is to delete her from my list of friends and I would never again get another reminder. I guess I am just not ready to do that.

Facebook might have numerous advantages - being reminded forever of someone's death is not one of them.

Remembering Genocide

When I was 12 or 13, I came across a book in my parent's very small library (actually it was no more than two or three short shelves). It was a small book, I think a paperback. It was an autobiography of someone who had survived living in one of the camps created by the Nazis for Jewish people. It told a horrendous tale of survival and of death. I was fascinated and horrified by it. It was a curious counterpart to all of the boy's books I had read by G.A. Henty. Books where a young British boy, through luck and courage survived wars or dangers - the books were always shaped around some sort of British imperialism and the theory that honesty and hard work will always prevail. This writer of this autobiography also survived, but it was not in the glorious fashion of Henty's heroes. I think reading that book may have been the start of me leaving most of my childhood fantasies behind. I talked to my father once about the story - he, if I remember rightly, just said that it was something meant for older readers.

In all of my years of public education, I don't remember any class or teacher spending any time discussing the Holocaust. If it was mention, it was only in passing. Certainly, none of my classes in university ever discussed it. And yet somehow I know about it, I have talked about it, discussed it with friends and have consistently been appalled at man's inhumanity to men. The Holocaust has always been a signpost leading to one of the lowest points in human history. But is it?

A few days ago, CBC (1) reported that one out five Canadian young people did not know about the Holocaust. The assumption was that we need to do more to ensure that Canadian children never forget. First of all - I am not sure if someone had done a survey with the students in either my grades 7, 8 or 9 classes in the early 1960s, if the results would have been that different. Secondly, as horrendous as was the Holocaust, our insistence that it is the most egregious example of genocide is incredibly Eurocentric. It might be the worst example of genocide in modern history, in Europe - but there have been other examples around the world that have been just as bad. The Ottoman Empire's acts against Armenians, the Khmer Rouge's slaughter of fellow Cambodians, the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Government of Sudan's slaughter and forced relocation of Darfuri citizens and perhaps most recently the Rohingya of Myanmar who are at significant risk are all acts of genocide. There are numerous other examples including the forced incarceration and slave labour of Africans as thousands and thousands of African were enslaved by western countries or, of course, the cultural genocide (at the very least) practiced on the First Nations people by agents of the Canadian Government.

It is not a denial of the Holocaust to argue that our schools need to spend time discussing other genocides. Our schools are not just for children whose heritage derives from Europe. Given that we are a multicultural society, we need to expand the conversation about humanity's capacity to be inhumane. Genocide is not just a European construct. Clearly, all cultures and faiths have the capacity to twist people's fears and insecurities, to blame others for economic problems, to encourage them to hate someone else, and to be labelled as being less than human - and therefore having no right to live.

The Holocaust was a terrible time and those of the Jewish faith are right to remind us of it, but we need to make sure that we allow others sufficient space in that dialogue so that we can acknowledge their histories, the stories of their culture's destruction and genocide.


(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-holocaust-survey-remembrance-1.4994602