A letter-writing campaign is demanding safer highways in Northern Ontario. Specifically, it's calling for changes on highways 11 and 17.
Kapuskasing's Noëlla Nadeau started the drive, Letter for Chad, after a particularly bad day for accidents on Highway 11.
On Jan. 12, multiple stretches of Highway 11 were closed for serious crashes involving transports from Val Rita to Temagami, including one that was fatal.
Chad Belanger was returning with the material he needed for his job at a heating and plumbing company that January day when his commercial fleet van was hit by a transport near Val Rita. According to the letter, the truck driver was unsafely passing another vehicle when it happened. Belanger was seriously injured in the crash. His recovery is slowly progressing and he is out of intensive care, said Nadeau.
Belanger is a close family friend and the collision was the catalyst for the letter-writing campaign.
“Everybody’s getting afraid to travel now. The conditions are bad on the road. Everybody I talk to talks about a close incident where somebody’s passing and you have to throw yourself off the road onto the gravel — when there’s gravel. There’s more and more vehicles travelling on the highway than there’s ever been,” she said.
For the campaign, Nadeau has written a letter that can be copied and pasted or modified to share your own experiences.
"It’s to tell Doug Ford that it has to change. This way of using the roads is not conducive to our welfare and to travelling at all,” she said.
There are a number of factors affecting safety. She said the weather's difficult and road maintenance isn't the same as when the Ministry of Transportation was doing it. There's also pressure for truck drivers to get to their destination and she said aggressive driving and inexperience have to be a factor.
“Truckers are so important, they’re vital to our lives, the economy and the vast majority of drivers are good drivers. There has to be something that can be improved upon … to help the drivers and try to ensure that it’s safe,” she said.
While solutions such as more passing lanes are more long-term, she said there needs to be action on things that can be changed now.
Nadeau doesn't know how many people have seen the campaign. Aside from Kapuskasing, she's talked to people in Hearst, Cochrane and Timmins.
At its best, she said the road closures are a problem. At worst, it's a life-threatening issue or causing death. The closures are affecting medical appointments, food and other merchandise being hauled, travel between communities, or students travelling out of town for school. And the list goes on.
Because people are emailing letters directly to Ford, Nadeau has no way of knowing how many letters are being sent.
"We can’t stop, that’s the only thing there is. Don’t suppose that everybody else wrote a letter … we need everyone,” she said.
Keep up to date with the campaign on Facebook or visit lettertochad.com.
Northern MPPs have pushed to improve highway maintenance standards in Northern Ontario.
Last year, when Mushkegowuk-James Bay MPP Guy Bourgouin reintroduced a bill to improve winter driving, he reported that 2013 data showed 54,000 truck trips per week on the highway and those numbers have increased.
In December, the province announced two sections of Highway 11 have been chosen to test the 2+1 highway model. It's a three-lane road with continuous, alternating passing lanes at regular intervals to prevent long lines of traffic behind slower vehicles and reduce unsafe passing.
The selected areas are a 14-kilometre stretch from Sand Dam Road, north of North Bay, to Ellesmere Road in the Marten River area and from Highway 64 to Jumping Cariboo Lake Road, a length of 16 kilometres, in the Temagami area.
