The holiday season has seen a spate of accidents on the highways of northwestern Ontario - seven between December 29th and January 6th according to stories reported on TBnewswatch. This has resulted in a number of deaths and highway closures as well as an outage of service for TbayTel with numerous customers losing phone, internet and television service. Indeed, since mid-December at least five people have been killed in highway collisions in the region across ten major accidents. Indeed, according to a CBC report, 34 people were killed on northwestern Ontario roads in 2022. This has made road safety a major issue and it has been exacerbated by what appear to be an increasing number of collisions involving transport trucks. Collisions involving transport trucks on area highways appear to have grown from 13.4 percent of the total in 2016 to 21.3 percent in 2021.
Of course, whether or not it is more dangerous to drive in northwestern Ontario relative to the rest of the province invariably requires not absolute numbers, but relative comparisons based on rates of fatalities that are population adjusted. For example, using data from Ontario Road Safety Annual Reports, in 2022, Ontario as a whole had 592 fatalities on its roads while northwestern Ontario had 34. However, while northwestern Ontario accounts for 1.5 percent of Ontario’s population, it accounted for over 6 percent of its persons killed in collisions in 2022 based on these numbers.
The trend is even more stark if one plots these road deaths per 100,000 population constructed from data available since 2015 from the Safety Reports combined with population data for Ontario and the northwest. It should be noted that the 2021 and 2022 reports are still preliminary and therefore do not include the official regional numbers. While there are numbers for Ontario as a whole for those two years, the rate per 100,000 was also estimated using population figures for those years. Thus, 2021 and 2022 for northwestern Ontario and Ontario are “estimates” based on Ontario population, the reported total by CBC for 2022 and a calculation for 2021 done based on the average from 2015 to 2022 of northwestern Ontario to Ontario fatalities.
The results show that when done per 100,000 population there
are substantially more deaths on northwestern Ontario roadways than Ontario as
a whole. From 2015 to 2022, average
fatalities per 100,000 population were 8.7 for the northwest while for Ontario
as a whole they were 4.0. In other words,
the roadways of the northwest are twice as deadly compared to the Ontario
average. And, while Ontario appears
stable over this time period, one could argue that the northwest is seeing an
overall upward trend. Is this a problem?
I would think so. The roads of the
northwest – in particular its highways - are not just regional roads but
national conduits for travel and commerce.
This is a provincial problem with local and national implications given
the number of lives being lost. Drivers beware.