|
Friday, June 13, 1997 Yellowknife letting NWT down
Last fall, NWT Transport Association spokesman Keith Mundy warned us that statistics showing the NWT is one of the safest jurisdictions in the country for transport trucks may not be altogether accurate.
At the time, Mundy said national statistics are based on a very small sampling of trucks and so might not be representative of what's actually moving along the North's roads and highways.
It didn't take long to prove him right.
In a truck inspection blitz in Yellowknife earlier this month -- the first time for such an event in the capital city -- three of 11 vehicles checked were taken off the road because they weren't safe, inspectors said.
Drivers of most of the other eight trucks received warnings for substandard working parts on their trucks and violations of trucking regulations.
One thing is certain: the NWT will probably not rate as the second-safest jurisdiction again this year. We'll be lucky if Yellowknife's trucks haven't sent us to the bottom of the list.
But far more important, this has served as a wake-up call for police and Department of Transportation officials to begin a more vigilant campaign against unsafe trucks.
Granted, the North has some trucking conditions that are found nowhere else in the country. But hundreds of kilometres of gravel highways, flying rocks and wildly fluctuating temperatures are no excuse for jury-rigged brakelines.
Transportation inspectors vow they will take a harder line on trucks, which means more inspections and probably pulling more vehicles off the road.
But it seems to us that the cost of such actions, coupled with higher repair bills for transport companies (which, no doubt, will be passed on to consumer), is well worth it if highway safety is any priority whatsoever in the North.
NorthwesTel's proposal for competition in the long-distance market might at first seem self-serving, asking as it does for competitors to pay it a portion of their profits.
But NorthwesTel built the Northern telephone network, not the southern companies eager to take advantage of a deregulated environment. Some sort of compensation for that investment is warranted.
The CRTC, the government agency which regulates the industry, should not jump to conclusions about how big those payments should be, however. Too often it has gone easy on the former monopolies. We look forward to reading the competition's point of view.
Has anyone else noticed that the weather forecasts have been less accurate than usual of late? When was the last time we got more or less what we were supposed to get?
There's almost certainly no connection to the recent decision to close down the Northern weather stations and funnel all data through Edmonton, which is now home to the "Arctic" weather centre. More likely it has to do with wild variations in traditional weather patterns that scientists say are slowly falling victim to global climate change.
Still, we can't help wondering if the old method of relying actual human beings wouldn't produce a more useful forecast....
|