Le
If you want to know the truth,
who do you go to?
A ten-year-old.
♪ ♪
Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Bob McKeown.
I'm the host of
CBC's
and I talk to people.
And I talk to people to ask questions that I hope
will get me to an interesting story,
and usually a story we're aiming at.
We've done lots of research by the time
we start asking questions of people
And we generally know where we're going in the first place.
But the great part about it is, you're always surprised.
[loud crash]
It is a nightmare scenario,
a runaway tractor-trailer,
a stalled school bus full of unsuspecting kids.
A brutal collision.
And I hear you recently did an investigation.
Can you tell us about what that investigation was?
Yeah. It was the lead story on our first show this season,
and it's about school bus safety,
especially seatbelts on school busses.
Do you realize that you, and your cohort,
are the only motor-vehicle passengers in Canada
who don't have to wear seatbelts?
And what was the most fascinating thing
about this investigation?
[sighs]
It's always fascinating, Ari, when they start.
And this one started with a terrible event last April.
It was the crash of the bus carrying
the Humboldt Broncos hockey team.
So, we started to look at that,
and one of the results of that was
that the Canadian government announced
they would make seatbelts on coach busses,
like that one, mandatory.
They would make them part of the law,
and you'd have to wear them.
At the same time though,
they had another paragraph in the news release, and often,
in our business, it's not the lead story
that is the really important one,
it's what you find behind that.
And they said they were going to put in a law
that would make seatbelts mandatory on coach busses.
But seatbelts were still not mandatory on school busses.
Did anything surprise you about this article?
What surprised me really is that once we started looking
at the Canadian government's research in to this,
we realized two things.
They had developed the position that basically said,
"Don't worry about seatbelts on school busses.
They probably won't help you in an accident,
and they might hurt you in an accident.
They might make injuries worse, or even, contribute to a death."
And it just -
that sounded totally opposite of common sense.
How could seatbelts that they tell us are saving lives
and preventing injuries in every other vehicle,
how could they actually hurt you in a school bus?
So that was the one thing.
That had been the Canadian position for a long time.
And then, as we dug deeper,
we found that they were aware
of research and other studies that,
some of which they had done,
that showed just the opposite.
That in fact, seatbelts do prevent injuries,
and save lives, even on school busses.
So the surprising part there was
they had kept this information from the Canadian public.
These are the people whose job it is
to keep us safe in motor vehicles.
And in fact, they were keeping
this key information away from us.
Ari: And what were kids' take on this?
What - did they have any ideas about this?
They did, and we saw kids in two different places.
We went to a state in the U.S.
where they have seatbelts in school busses, Texas.
And all the arguments were they're too expensive,
they're too much trouble,
drivers don't like them,
the kids don't like them.
We found, in fact, all of those are just untrue.
They cost pennies a day, literally,
to have seatbelts in school busses.
Pennies per kid.
In terms of the drivers and the kids,
we saw kids from five to seventeen.
They all just jumped in the bus, did up their belt.
Then we came to Toronto and we rode on the bus
of Holy Trinity Elementary, in Toronto.
And of the 12 kids on our bus,
11 of them said they want seatbelts.
They didn't know why they didn't have seatbelts.
It's safer if you put on seatbelts for the younger kids,
and for us too.
Put seatbelts on school busses.
I always wanted to know
why there's no seatbelts on school busses.
For a way to encourage kids to try seatbelts in a school bus,
do think - how do you think they should present that?
Well, what they do down in Texas is they -
the way they have fire drills in, you know, your school here,
they have various drills in
and around school busses with seatbelts.
So, getting in to your seatbelt,
getting out of your seatbelt in an emergency situation,
because if there's a crash, that would be something
you'd want to do as quickly as possible.
So, and - but I think the fact is that kids know
about seatbelts so well at this stage.
You know, some of us adults didn't have seatbelts
until we were older.
You guys have had seatbelts since you were born.
So it doesn't really take that much education.
It's been an honour meeting you, Bob.
Ari, likewise.
I'm Ari Resnick for CBC Kids News.