Dear provincial legislators:
We are Canadian. You can force us to wear helmets when we ski
and skate, if you want to.
I’m not saying Canadians—as a people—roll over and take
whatever’s coming. No, no. We are a strong, proud country. We resisted
American invasion in the War of 1812 and we’ll continue our feisty
fight against American cultural domination, too (just so long as the
Tories change their minds and give that bridge loan to the CBC so
there’s some other way for the English TV folks to get through their
nights without having to plug up the programming holes with Wheel of
Fortune. Then again, with Pat Sajak on the bill, my 88-year-old
grandmother might start watching the CBC after all these years).
Yes, we’re strong. But we don’t have that
bristling-against-authority streak—the one that drives the American
right-to-bear-arms stuff and the one that riles up the French enough
for them to hold general strikes whenever they get their knickers ina
knot.
Just tell us to wear helmets, give us a little ramp-up time and
boom! Thousands of head injuries a year from snows sports could
disappear. A portion of the yearly estimated $100 million taxpayers
shell out to treat recreational head injuries could be saved, along
with lives, like that of actor Natasha Richardson, who died last week
two days after hitting her head during a fall on a beginner ski slope
in Quebec.
Richardson made a choice not to wear a helmet. It’s the custom for
winter activities—we leave risk-management choices for adults in
their own hands.
And what if provincial legislators decide to take it out of our
hands?
We’re Canadian. We’d get used to it. A little grumbling, some
letters to the editor, a few tickets issued to the particularly
bold—and it would be done.
And then? Well, then people would start to wear helmets even when
they weren’t actually required to—the same way we clip on our
seat belts the moment we get on a plane and leave them snapped for the
whole flight, and the same way most Canadian adults would automatically
wear a motorcycle helmet in Texas, or most Haligonians would wear a
bike helmet riding on the streets of Ottawa. People would wear helmets
tobogganing and cross-country skiing and maybe even snowshoeing.
Probably, without even giving it a second thought.
We got over seat belt legislation; we got over helmets in hockey;
we’ll eventually get over less and less fighting in hockey too—god
love Don Cherry and Brian Burke, but the dinosaurs of the sport are
about to go extinct and the change is going to come.
As for helmets on ski hills and ice-skating rinks? We’re practically
begging for legislation. Or, I am, anyway. Because in my tiny empire,
the kids have to wear helmets and the adults don’t. And the
double-standard is killing me.
The more I have to justify helmets to my kids—in advance of skiing
and snowboarding and skating—and the more they probe my “it’s
different for adults” bullshit, the thinner my argument comes off. (And
it’s only the beginning—they’re young enough now to clip on their
helmets and pass it off as the law of the land, at least in Lowe-land.
Soon, they’ll be riding me like circus ponies over my nonsensical
risk-management mumbo-jumbo.)
Being forced to put on a helmet by the province? It wouldn’t just
save money and lives. Really it would save me—and other parents I
know—a lot of future false rationalizing.
So why not take the initiative and do it on my own?
Well, yeah—why?
Why, when I went to both public skates at the Dalhousie Arena
Sunday, did I not see a single adult with a helmet at the morning skate
and only one with head protection in the afternoon? Children? Not one,
at either skate, was helmetless.
No one can predict slipping backwards at the blue line, sliding
sideways off a sled going over an ice precipice on Citadel Hill or a
devastating head-bonking on a beginner ski hill. No one can prevent an
accident—that’s why we have a special name for them. If they weren’t
accidents, they’d be choices.
So why do I choose not to wear a helmet when I ski or skate or
snowboard?
I guess I’m just a kid too, waiting for someone bigger to tell me
what to do.
Tell Lezlie Lowe what to do at lezliel@thecoast.ca
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2009.