Legislative Assembly

of those and a nylon rope and you can throw it to a person and they can hold it to keep them afloat. This is something I have often wondered. I have heard it sug- gested in the past few years. Why doesn't Government put a few ring buoys and life preservers on the end of a wharf where there may be children around swimming and use them. However, we do know this and I am not speaking politically now, but rather as one that is interested in safety, that if G0vernment put anything out people will pick them up and carry them away. Why? Because it belongs to Government. I will take it. But if the communities themselves, put them out there and this will require very little if any expense and very little time on their part, they will not be picked up and taken away, but rather left there and respected and in proper condition. I believe this is the attitude that we all must keep in sight.

We should have more rigid control of boating regulations as I have men- tioned, particularly in the equipment, the fire extinguisher, the baler, as well as extra paddles or oars that should be in, particularly on motor craft and as well of course, your life jackets.

With many many more of our tourists, and more and more of our Island people going out deep-sea fishing these days, we can't be too careful. I would like to see something come about in insurance covering these passengers, particularly when they are paid passengers and taken out deep-sea fishing. So, with all of this once again, I think care, caution and courtesy in all our acts around any classes of water safety will help, not only to save lives, but to prevent serious injury in many cases.

I would like to spend a moment or two on Highway Safety, and this I believe is a part of safety here in the Province that always hits us very strongly because when we have a highway accident it is similar to a plane crash. Its news, its usually very severe, it makes good reading in the press and we get headline cov- erage. This is one of the most misleading things we can look at, the thirty to thirty-five deaths that we seem to have here a year in the Province. We have thirteen hundred and some odd accidents, and it usually involves two cars. Where it only involves one, there are enough three and four car collisions to make up for the single. So it would be safe to say that there would be at least twenty- six hundred drivers or persons involved in accidents in a year. Thirty-five persons fatally injured at an accident is very small. It could be well up close to three thousand from the number of accidents that we have. The number one cause of highway accidents, believe it or not, is inattentive driving and the one thing that they do lay down and suggest is the lighting of cigarettes while you are driving. When we think of accidents as being the third leading cause of deaths here in the Province, where we have an average of seventy-two per hundred thousand deaths a year, the national average is only fifty-two to fifty-four percent or fifty-two to fifty-four in a hundred thousand, we can see that it is a very unsafe place to live. There are many things we can do in highway safety, and I think there is work being done all the time by our engineers by trying to improve roads, trying to come up to safety standards, the standardization of signs and warning signals and so on. This is all a part of it. This can be done by Government. Government can take the lead in many other things in highway safety.

We are getting into a day and age now that we have more cars on the road, therefore, the possibility of an accident is much greater than it was twenty or thirty years ago, much greater than it was ten years ago. I wouldn’t doubt when this resolution goes to Ottawa and we have our Causeway built, that it will increase many times over. So we should prepare for this now, with things like re—examina- tion of drivers, and the driver improvement program. It is being carried on now through our Vocational Schools and in some Regional High School. I would like to see it in every Regional High School. Train the youth to drive properly and they will have better attitudes towards driving in later years. It was suggested at the Workshop that there be a medical advisory board set up to help in this re-examina- tion for persons who may have defective eye sight or other things that may be wrong with them. They may be diabetic and subject to black~outs; they have a very serious heart condition, and they not only injure or kill themselves in an accident, but what might they do to many others? It is not only for the protection of others but for the protection of the individual himself. It is too late to lock the door after the horse has been stolen. This point system is very good and I think it is

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