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August 14, 2005
Here come the booster
I don't have kids, or a car for that matter, so maybe this new booster seat law here in Ontario shouldn't bother me at all. But it does — as with most of this nannyish behaviour, the law itself bothers me a little and the justification for it annoys the hell out of me:
Transportation Minister Harinder Takhar said yesterday the importance of proper child restraint can be best illustrated by a recent deadly head-on crash on Highway 400 near Barrie, where a 7-month-old baby buckled into a car seat escaped without a scratch.
"That crash is an example of why we are making ... booster seats mandatory," he said. "We know that children are safer in child seats and booster seats. They can reduce the risk of death or injury by as much as 75 per cent."
Got that? Baby seats have been mandatory since goodness knows when. And because one of these baby seats worked as it's supposed to, it's an example of why a totally different product should be made mandatory for a different group of children. If Takhar had inserted some sort of personal tragedy as a motivating factor — a six-year-old nephew dying in a car accident, say, which might have been prevented, if only… — it would have been Ontario provincial politics in a nutshell. It's pretty close as it is.
And aside from all the nonsensical justification, the law itself doesn't make any sense either. As the Ministry of Transportation explains:
A child can start using a seatbelt alone once any one of the following criteria is met:
• child turns eight years old
• child weighs 36 kg (80 lbs)
• child is 145 cm (4 feet 9 inches) tall.
If this is truly about safety, then there's no earthly reason for the age limitation. Of course, this isn't actually about safety — it's about the cult of safety, the march towards a world wherein premature death has been outlawed with 100 percent compliance. But even that doesn't explain why, all other things being equal, the government would choose to allow children their freedom on their eight birthdays. It's just stupid, which is also Ontario provincial politics in a nutshell.
But wait — eight years old is just a guideline. On Saturday, Mark Richardson suggested the following:
Don't remove the booster until you're comfortable that your child is safe.
Sounds reasonable enough, accepting that we no longer have the right to decide for ourselves when our underage, underweight and/or underheight children are safe. But then, the kicker, delivered in that quintessential Toronto Star sneer:
If all that [helpful advice] fails, then tough. If you can't be a responsible parent or guardian, you'll be fined $110 and two demerit points. It's no different from not wearing a seat belt.
Remember, people, that's after September 1. For the next two weeks, allowing your seven-year-old to ride in the back seat with his seatbelt on will remain perfectly acceptable parenting. Then Bill 73 comes into effect, and parenting and common sense will be forever changed. Ignore the new reality at your peril, mothers and fathers and legal guardians of Ontario, or feel the wrath of two demerit points and the shame of ten million clucking tongues.
(Oh, and speaking of Bill 73, if you lend your car to someone after September 1st and he passes a stopped school bus — or if your car does so of its own accord — you can be charged. School buses still don't have to have seatbelts, by the way, let alone booster seats for their passengers.)
Posted by Chris Selley at August 14, 2005 03:26 PM
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Comments
The Highway Traffic Act, at section 207, provides that a non-driver owner may be liable to the same punishment as the driver, but excludes most driving offences, e.g., speeding, careless driving and failure to yield right of way.
Is there any reason not to exclude the offence of passing a school bus, other than the fact that this involves children?
Posted by: Spadinasaur at August 15, 2005 04:22 PM
What you say is news to me, Spadinasaur, so I hereby extend my objection to cover the whole idea. Why the hell should I, sitting here at my computer, be held accountable if someone does something unfortunate with my car?
Posted by: Chris Selley at August 15, 2005 11:04 PM
How the heck are you suppose to carpool kids to school or soccer practice? Do you have to keep four extra child seats around?
Futhermore, while not versused in the laws of physics, I can only imagine that age does not factor into whether a child is ejected from a car upon impact. Therefore if the government is to impose a law to hyper-protect children, then height and weight should be their sole concerns. Checking out an average height and weight chart for children (http://www.babybag.com/articles/htwt_av.htm) it looks like the imposed Ontario restrictions are only met on average at the age of ten (for weight) and eleven (for height). Therefore one would imagine that to effectively protect a child from his or her eighth birthday until they reach a size where a regular seat-beat will do the job, you need to raise the age limit even higher. All pointless because you need some very effective parenting skills to tell a six year old why he still needs to sit in the booster chair. Why not append the law to - "off the teat and out of the seat".
Posted by: montrealguy at August 16, 2005 08:32 PM
I think the age 8 restriction has not to do with the physics of ejection, but with the physics of whiplash.
My understanding is that a child of 8 will have sufficiently 'set' bones or cartilage or something that injuries to those parts of the body are much less likely with the different seat-belt angles in the different seats.
And as for carpooling, all my grandchildren have the booster seats, and they're pretty portable. Each child just takes his or hers into whatever car they're getting into.
Posted by: Granny at April 16, 2006 07:06 PM