Manitoba Committee Hansard — 28 July 1983 (Statutory Regulations and Orders Committee, Sitting 8, 32nd Legislature, 2nd Session)

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Manitoba — Debates (Hansard)

JSSN 0542-5492 Second Session - Thirty-Second Legislature of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba STANDING COMMITTEE on STATUTORY REGULATIONS and ORDERS 31-32 Elizabeth 11 Chairman Mr. Peter Fox Constituency of Concordia VOL. XXXI No. 8 - 8:00 p.m., THURSDAY, 28 JULY, 1983. Printed by the Office of the Queens Printer. ProVInce of Manitoba

MA NITOBA LEGISLATIVE ASSE MBLY Thirty-Second Legislature Members, Constituencies and Political Affiliation Name ADAM, Hon. A.R. (Pete) ANSTETT, Andy ASHTON, Steve BANMAN, Robert (Bob) BLAKE, David R. (Dave) BROWN, Arnold BUCKLASCHUK, Hon. John M. CARROLL, Q.C., Henry N. CORRIN, Brian COWAN, Hon. Jay DESJARDINS, Hon. Laurent DODICK, Doreen DOERN, Russell DOLIN, Hon. Mary Beth DOWNEY, James E. DRIEDGER, Albert ENNS, Harry EVANS, Hon. Leonard S. EYLER, Phil FILMON, Gary FOX, Peter GOURLAY, D.M. (Doug) GRAHAM, Harry HAMMOND, Gerrie HARAPIAK, Harry M. HARPER, Elijah HEMPHILL, Hon. Maureen HYDE, Lloyd JOHNSTON, J.

Frank KOSTYRA,Hon. Eugene KOVNATS, Abe LECUYER, Gerard LYON, Q.C., Hon. Sterling MACKLING, Q.C., Hon. AI MALINOWSKI, Donald M. MANNESS, Clayton McKENZIE, J. Wally MERCIER, Q.C., G.W.J. (Gerry) NORDMAN, Rurik (Ric) OLESON, Charlotte ORCHARD, Donald PAWLEY, Q.C., Hon. Howard R. PARASIUK, Hon. Wilson PENNER, Q.C., Hon. Roland PHILLIPS, Myrna A. PLOHMAN, Hon. John RANSOM, A. Brian SANTOS, Conrad SCHROEDER,Hon.Yic SCOTT, Don SHERMAN, L.R. (Bud) SMITH, Hon. Muriel STEEN, Warren STORIE, Hon. Jerry T.. URUSKI, Hon. Bill USKIW, Hon. Samuel WALDING, Hon. D. James Constituency Ste.

Rose Springfield Thompson La Verendrye Minnedosa Rhineland Gimli Brandon West Ellice Churchill St. Boniface Aiel Elmwood Kildonan Arthur Emerson Lakeside Brandon East River East Tuxedo Concordia Swan River Virden Kirkfield Park The Pas Rupertsland Logan Portage la Prairie Sturgeon Creek Seven Oaks Niakwa Radisson Charleswood St. James St. Johns Morris Roblin-Russell St. Norbert Assiniboia Gladstone Pembina Selkirk Transcona Fort Rouge Wolseley Dauphin Turtle Mountain Burrows Rossmere lnkster Fort Garry Osborne River Heights Flin Flon lnterlake Lac du Bonnet St.

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LEG ISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF MANITOBA THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON STATUTOR Y REG ULATIONS AND ORDERS Thursday, 28 July, 1983 TIME - 8:00 p.m. LOCATION - Winnipeg CHAIRMAN - Mr. Peter Fox (Concordia) ATTENDANCE - QUORUM - 6 Members of the Committee present: Hon. Mr. Uskiw Messrs. Fox, Harper, Kovnats, Malinowski, McKenzie, Mrs. Oleson, Ms. Phillips, Messrs. Orchard and Scott WITNESSES: Representations were made to the committee as follows: Mr. Elliott Levine, private citizen Mr. Phil Zubrycki, private citizen Mr. George Chapman, private citizen WRITTEN SUBMISSIONS: Mr. Gary J. Hudson (Shoal Lake, Man.) Dr. Bill Ewart, private citizen MATTERS UNDER DISCUSSION: Bill No. 60 -

An Act to amend The Highway Traffic Act (2). MR. CHAIRMAN: Elliott Levine. MR. E. LEVINE: I suppose after our break and at least a slight relaxation for dinner, we'll take a while to get back to where we were, but I was reviewing the belt use statistics and what appears to be fairly reliable data based on a num ber of studies. I had cited three or four studies from Ontario that seemed to indicate 50 percent as reasonable belt use and, indeed, people who have been doing this work in Manitoba believe that's a reasonable ballpark. You might be a few percentage up one month if you're down another month.

Part of the trouble with some of the Ontario studies was that they were done during the daylight hours because that's the only time they could see and because of budgetary constraints, they only did it Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. We know that the big bumps in fatalities are Thu rsday, 11 o'clock at night, till 4 in the morning, Friday-Saturday, that kind of thing, and they weren't particularly counted.

There was the presumption in these studies, whenever there is a study that suggests that the numbers get closer to 60 percent, I get nervous because I find out that these were primarily eyeball studies in the day1ime, and they were looking at what we know is the safer percentage of the population, and we know the safer 201 percentage of the population tends to belt up with a higher frequency perhaps than the drunks who drive at night. We know the drunks who drive at night conservatively kill 40 percent after we'd throw in the impaireds over 50 percent and some recent disturbing studies.

I mean it was expected in terms of taking in all sorts of impairment in terms of drugs and probably the alcohol that isn't legally officially being picked up perhaps because of blood test absence or what have you. Some studies have suggested 85 percent. The user rate for belts for impaired drivers and the blood alcohol count study that was done in Ontario - the BAC study - shows the correlation. This was a nighttime study where they pulled drivers off the road, promised not to prosecute them.

The only concession that they made was if they were really sloshed, they wouldn't let them drive home but that they wouldn't charge them. They'd send them home by cab or by cruiser. That study showed, and these were for drivers who although they were legally drunk had not had accidents, that the more booze in their system, the less likely they were to belt up.

While you and I might think that's intuitively obvious, the report said this was a surprising result, because before that time in Ontario at least, the researchers had assumed that drunk drivers belted up with the same frequency that sober drivers did, and for that reason, if they had a reason - maybe this is their benign neglect, they never bothered to make a separate count, although they do have it in their accident reports, to correlate belt use and drunks.

We know from the blood alcohol count study that Ontario did that the more drunk, the less likely to belt up and, if you average and say you assume that these people belted up at half the average rate, you'd be very conservative because these were for the sober enough drunks not to get in an accident. We know that the majority of kills are from booze related drivers, and these drivers are drunk enough to get in accidents.

I'm not the only person who has requested that these figures be pulled apart and that a separate count be made - we have it police reports identify both belt use and drunkeness - that those figures be pulled apart so that we can identify sober people and see what happens to tl)em when they're belted and not belted. But, nonetheless, we can make a reasonable extrapolation. The next study that I would like to suggest to you is the series of statistical reports out of Ontario, 19 73- 74, 1974-75; they show some interesting things.

When Ontario belted without being required to, so these are pretty honest results, 13.4 percent belt rate, they found 13.5 percent of their accidents were uninjured. In other words, they could show one tenth of 1 percent possible benefit, in terms of injuries; in other words, that's an insignificant statistic, .01 percent in 13. Wh at the data showed in Ontario, when they did not have compulsory belt legislation, was that belting at a 13 percent rate didn't im prove matters, didn't represent a net benefit in terms of reducing accidents.

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 Now here's the kicker. When Ontario is reporting a 50 percent rate or Ontario is reporting an 80 percent rate, it doesn't matter either. The best case that Ontario can make is that belts don't matter but, because of the way in which the figures are cooked, I would suggest to you that the more reasonable

interpretation, given this very very disturbing problem with drunks who don't belt up, it clearly looks as if the net effect of belts, for whatever reasons, and we could go into those if you wanted, but for whatever reasons, it looks as if the total effect of belts is a minus, in terms of the safety factor and not a positive factor. The researchers that I talked to informally with in Manitoba, I find a couple of things with regard to drunks. The ICU people are very unhappy about seeing people in the ICU and they say, we've got to belt up so that people don't show up in the ICU.

Some of them cynically say, better these people died in belts, even if you're right about belts, because it's horrible to be in the ICU with spinal injuries, what have you.

The other point that I wanted to make to them is, when you're looking at drunk-related statistics for which belts were irrelevant, what is the breakdown in Manitoba? lt may be that other people have figures, but one of the researchers at Health Sciences, whose job is to research what goes on in ICU, who personally believes in belts, did not know and did not care - he's been doing this for years - he did not know and did not care whether his ICU clientele were drunk or not; the only thing he cared about was to identify whether they wore belts. I submit to you, this is patently ridiculous.

If we know that the drunks are killing most of the people and we have every reason to believe that belts are useless, if not dangerous, then surely, so as not to pretend that belts are dangerous and belts are causing what drunks are causing, it must be totally irresponsible and certainly unacceptable to refuse to separate, to make a distinction between someone who is hospitalized because he was drunk and someone who is hospitalized because he was belted up.

This is one of the uneasinesses that I have with the data, when resea rchers refuse to look at what the obvious explanation is because the conclusion would fly in the face of accepted wisdom. Belts are neutral, according to Ontario statistics. What do they tell us about total kills? 1973, optional use of belts, combined belt and non-belt kills in Ontario, 515 for drivers. They're roughly the same, a little bit less for passengers, but let's just look at drivers because we have the data easily available. In 19 74, 522; 19 75, 505, averaging around 510, 511; not compuls ory, 13 percent belt use.

Five years later, 19 80-19 81, compulsory belt use - they'd had it for five years; it settled out; they know the results. I believe, because of the road counts that were done, it's honest to say you now have four times the belt use in Ontario, 50 percent. Ontario motor vehicle accident facts, 1981, says they have an 81 percent belt use. I asked a researcher in Manitoba the other night, who didn't know about this report, what he would think would happen if you shifted all the way up to an 80 percent belt use, what it would do to the fatalities, to the result of accidents. He said it wouldn't mean much.

Now this is someone who knows the data and he's talking to me privately - I don't know what he'll say publicly. We have had, clearly, the indication from people 202 who have been talking to you, that if you legislators can only get these sluggards who are belting up at less than 10 percent in Manitoba, to belt up at 50 percent - Nirvana - they know damn well nothing will happen; at best, nothing will happen. I'm nervous that you're going to kill people, net. In Ontario, they managed to kill 513 in 1980, 506 in 1981.

Ontario manages to kill exactly the same number of people when Ontario reports 81 percent belt use - 80 percent and a fraction. Think of that. You are being asked to legislate so that people will wear belts. Ontario manages to kill at least as many people who are drivers, and notice, this is despite the fact that the total automotive kills are lower, the road speeds are lower, the vehicles are safer, people are wearing belts in inordinant numbers, and we could quibble whether it's 50 or 80 percent, but that's clearly higher than 13, and it does not decrease kills.

The kindest thing you can say is that, hey, people might be a little bit remiss in looking at their data when they tell you, the legislators, that if you can only get people to belt up you will be doing a great thing, not as many people will be dying. I submit to you that the only province in Canada, and the reason I use Ontario, partly because it's a sister province, but it's the only jurisdiction that is large enough with it's 8.5 to 9 million population, with it's budget that exceeds ours, with the decades of keeping of data, Ontario is the only place that has respectable data that we can look at.

The most respecta ble Canadian data tells you that anyone who says that belts are going to reduce kills isn't telling it like it is. Now I know they have a total of more drivers in Ontario now than they did five years ago, whatever, but the point is as a percentage of total automotive kills, Ontario has managed to shift from 28 percent to about 32 or 33 percent.

If you look at the total number of people who get themselves killed in automobile related accidents, Ontario belting at the high rate between 50 and 80, depending who you want to believe, comp ared to the 13 percent rate, Ontario with compu lsory belt legislation kills a higher percentage of automotive related deaths in its drivers, and we know they're belted up; I mean pedestrians aren't belted up.

I would submit to you that I would be nervous about believing that I am going to do anything but do what Ontario did and increase the percentage of drivers who are getting killed in automotive accidents in my province if I brought in belt legislation, because Ontario did precisely that. Saskatchewan - I don't know why they out-perform us, but they move from 263 to 295. They have kill rates in their total automotive package that is far far worse than ours, and their negative performance vis-a-vis ours increased dramatically when they belted up.

Surely, people who are coming to you and saying belts are a panacea have the clear obligation to make an honest case, and my problem is they can't make that case. I can tell you there are three kinds of cases that can be made.

(1) You do autopsies on individuals and you say they died because of X and Y. In itself, that's inconclusive. That has to be put in a context that can compare what would reasonably happen if you were comparing a jur isdiction that doesn 't have any significant number of belts, and I was told - again, I assumed that we had 7 percent belted in Manitoba, and I'm told it's as low as 4 percent by one of the

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 researchers here. He's the source. I don't want to say that's a truth, but we both agree it's not enough to get a count that's worth very much. So in the absence of having remembered that man who's looking for his five-spot under the lamp post when the real evidence is in the dark where he can't find it, we do not have the data in Manitoba itself to tell us what happens in Manitoba with belts. We don't have the experience. But for God's sake, we have the experience of Ontario, and we know that it looks dangerous in Ontario. lt looks as if you're going to increase your kills.

Look, Ontario identifies in its motor vehicle accident facts that it has in its hospital - these aren't the minor injuries, these are the serious injuries - six out of ten people in the hospitals are there because they were wearing belts and they're there. We know from other studies that it looks like they were belted up 50 percent.

The only way you can believe that Ontario isn't doing a net damage with its belts is to believe that they must have been belted up 60 percent, because if they weren't belted up 60 percent, then my God, belts would have been injuring more people than they were saving; but when you send people out to count who's wearing what on the highways, 51 percent looks like the most generous thing that you can say that they're actually wearing in the years in which they are identifying. I'm taking Ontario's facts.

The only thing I'm quibbling with is I'm saying Ontario has a number of studies that say they belted 50 percent, and when they come to say how many people they have in the hospitals and how many people they kill, then they say that we're belted over 80 percent. I am nervous about the 80 percent, but I'm just telling you, they say 80 percent. Now, why that 80 percent is significant is because of this. Our Ma nitoba Medi cal Association has subm itted a brief to you, and I don't know how cautious they are with their facts.

I was a little nervous when they tell you that over 10 years we killed 200 a year when that's out by 10-20 percent. it's an impressionistic way in which to use figures. They clearly told to you, as reported October 18, 1982, the MMA says - I'm quoting the Free Press, Manfred Jager. Presumably, he was honestly reporting the briefs that were submitted to you. The MMA says, "Serious injury is 65 percent more likely without safety belts while the risk of death is up by an average 50 percent." In another place, recently, they are saying four times the accident risk if you're not belted up.

I can tell you that figure is in here, Ontario Motor Vehicle Facts. Was it distributed to you? How they get that, the statistics sheet that was distributed, I've underlined: "Injured, 9, 162 - belts installed, not used; installed and used - 38,000." Now, what they have said is that 9,000 injured was generated by 9 percent of the drivers who weren't belted up. What they say is that the 38,000 was generated by the over 80 percent of the drivers who were belted up.

Now, that clearly says 40 percent of the injuries are generated by 9 percent of the drivers, therefore, you're four times as likely to be injured if you're not wearing a belt. If you believe that I would suggest you consider one other factor. Ontario admits it has 7 percent of its drivers stinko drunk. They generate 38 percent of their kills, 42 in a good year. You can account for just about 100 percent of what Ontario says the belt damage is for 203 drunks who we know don't wear belts. What Ontario is telling you then is that it has over four times as many people injured wearing belts as not wearing belts.

But I would suggest to you the honest way to look at it is this; we know half the people wear belts and half don't wear belts, I would be frightened as hell, if I were you, if I knew that Ontario got four times as many people injured wearing belts as not wearing belts when you know darn well only half the people are wearing belts.

When you then take away the drunks who weren't wearing belts I can tell you that, after looking at those figures, is the reason why I, who am a sober driver, do not intend to belt up, because the figures look as if you are - I'll be modest about it - significantly more likely to be at risk if you're belted up and sober, and I would suggest that, while you are looking at the other parts of your legislation, you know that drinking causes most of the problem.

Quit fooling yourself that because you can't do anything about drinking and you can do something about belts, that by looking under the lamp post, that by asking people to wear belts, you're going to do anything about deaths.

The likelihood is that, marginally, I'm not saying you're going to see a huge increase in kills, but you've got the problem that, when those kills start coming in with people who are wearing belts, that it's on your conscience that you know that probably the net result is that there is an increase in deaths and, of those people who are wearing belts, you can excuse away some of them and say they would have died anyway; and others, and say, well maybe that one died because they were wearing a belt but look at the one we saved, but the statistical case is more ominous.

The only reason I bothered to get myself involved in this is that the case looks worse than that and I would hope that you would be more cautious about that. I had not originally intended to say anything about child restraints. Personally, intuitively, child restraints seem great. I would caution you though that the same Ontario study that identifies how great belts are but it has to rely upon an 80 percent user rate to hook up its data, appears to perhaps be cooking its data here too. Now I haven't heard anyone mention numbers.

We've had euphemisms like the injuries are less, aren't as serious or we know where the injuries are and no statistical data. Quite frankly, I believe that no one yet has enough studies on this. My intuitions are that probably beltl; are a good thing, but here is what you have to confront. Ontario says, 200 - well, hundreds of babies every year are injured, however they count injuries, who are wearing infant restraints, child restraints. Apparently this is for zero to one-year-olds as opposed to about 14 who weren't.

Now, I still believe infant restraints are probably good but look what you have to swallow in order to legislate infant restraints. In a sister jurisdiction that legislates infant restraints, they are running at ratios of over 200 in 1980; 204 were injured in 19 81; 222 in 1980; 14 were injured in 1981 not wearing infant restraints; 23 injured in 1980 not wearing infant restraints. Now here is how the data is handled to say that infant restraints are three times as safe as not infant restraints, and I leave it up to you to decide whether or not you should be suspicious.

I honestly don't know because being a parent myself, I used to use sort of a basket

Thursday, 28 "uly, 1983 and put my child in the back, in the well of a 5,000 lb. car and there was no place for the child to fall or get a whiplash or anything when she was an infant and after that I used - this was in the '60s before anything was required - child seats that had sort of a secure bar and head whiplash and various other things. lt wasn't perfect but it seemed reasonable giving the technology of the day. My problem is that Ontario has to report 97 percent users.

If you believe that Ontario has or that you were likely to get 97 out of a 100 infants in a proper certified restraint, then when you report that 88 percent of the infants who were injured were wearing restraints, that's a good figure because if you've got 97 percent of the population but only 88 percent of the injuries you're doing those kids a favour because you're saying that the remaining 12 percent of the injuries were generated from only 3 percent of the population.

But if you have reason to suspect that people were lying when they filled out the police reports, and if you have reason to think that - wow! - could you really get 88 percent of the popula ce to use infant restraints? Then you're in the position of not knowing whether or not infant restraints and that are good or not. Here are some of the problems with infant restraints. People are tending to use smaller cars now.

You take a Honda Civic - one of my neighbours, I pointed this out to her the other day and she said, oh my God, you're right and she immediately moved the infant restraint - she had the infant restrained in the perimeter of the car because she wanted to have another person in the seat with the child but it doesn't take very much to take a foot or so off the side of Honda Civic. If a child is restrained or packaged as a euphemism is in that perimeter of the car that disappears in a side hit - goodbye child. If that child was loosely packaged, they bounce, they've got a better chance of survival.

I would be nervous enough to want to legislate that infant restraints, if they are to be used, must be in the centre of the vehicle where they crush a foot or two off the back or the front or the sides before they get to the kid. I don't know how reasonable that requirement would be for subcompacts, but when Ontario reports 88 percent infant injuries from infant seats, I'm not saying to you that I feel - personally, I think they make a better case for infant restraints then they do for seat belts for adults.

But I am saying that you have to believe that Ontario is belting up at a 97 percent user rate in order to believe Ontario when Ontario says you're three times less likely to be injured on average. One other thing to do with statistics before I try to put this into some sort of semblance. Very few things kill children who are five years old or three years old. I mean once a child survives its fi�st six months, it survives. Cancer starts getting at 30, 40 or whatever.

When we look at the kills to passengers by age groups, we find that before the age of 16 years - in other words from zero to 16, we kill about the same number of kids per year, per age group. That kill rate is about the same as 35 years old, 36 years old, 38 years old, 40 and 65. In other words, you take a population of 60-year-olds and a population of 10-year-olds and you're going to kill about the same number of them as passengers in automobiles in a given year. But it's only going to be a small thing that's going to kill.

The 60-year-olds are dying of all sorts of things, but for the kids, my God, 204 that's possibly the leading cause of their death and you're asked to do something about this epidemic. Look, we're not kidding anyone. We know, you get in a car, there's an assignable risk per million miles, so many chances of getting killed. lt really doesn't matter whether that is a four-year-old passenger or a 64-year-old passenger, a million miles of driving is a million miles of driving and you kill them at the same rate.

The only reason I bring this up is as a cautionary note because if you're starting to belt up five-, six-, seven-, eight-year-olds in adult restraints and the adult restraints are questionable for adults - we know they're not made to fit children - you're not going to legislate a custom made size belt for every age from 10 pounds to 300. You are legislating ill-fitting belts that probably are net dangerous to adults, to kids who start off with the same danger to themselves from a million miles of driving as a 30- or 40- or 50-year-old. lt looks dramatic. My God, you figure he has his whole life ahead of him.

A five-year-old life wasted and a 60- year-old - oh well, he probably had cancer anyhow, so big deal, an auto wreck got him; but the point is the numbers only look dramatic for the children when you put them in the context of nothing else is killing them. When you say, does automobile travel kill? Sure it kills. If you then say to those kids that they have to wear belts that were not designed for them, surely a belt that is not designed for them is not going to be safer than a belt that was designed for them.

Belts are supposedly designed for the adults and I am telling you that the case is not being made on the basis of the statistics that this government has directed me to look at, that belts are worth anything. The case appears to be that belts are increasing your liability and here you're saying a belt that possibly - I'm not saying guaranteed - but that possibly increases liability for an adult, when it's fitted for an adult you're going to because all of a sudden it's the latest thing to look after kids, we're going to legislate it for children. Well, quite frankly, I have this horrendous scenario.

My God, I've got to fight the Children's Aid Society again because they're going to want to come and take my children because I'm not taking care of them. Luckily my kids are getting older, you probably won't come after me, but my nine-year-old, they might. I, quite frankly, don't tell my kids that they have to belt up or not, but maybe they've read the data that I have and they may be biased because they've been exposed to me, I don't know. They fight me on a lot of things, and they don't agree with their old man on a lot of things.

In belts, quite frankly, the propaganda that's hit them in the school system, they sit there and they laugh at it, and they're not the only ones. Various people go around with various movies that they show at the schools to show them that they should be wearing belts. If the reason why your education isn't getting through, Mr. Uskiw, and members of the government, I would suggest it's because it's propaganda and there's hope yet, our citizenry isn't that readily flimflammed. Well, I will perhaps return to numbers, if you wish, to have me identify these reports later.

I'd like to refer to my brief, at this moment, because I really think that the statistical case is only part of the problem. I would remind you that we are looking at people looking under the lamp post when they're looking for what the heck belts do in Manitoba. The belts aren't used in Manitoba,

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 so the best they can say is we don't know, and the surprising thing is the people I've talked to don't know what the correlation is between booze and belts, and they don't seem to know what the belt experience is in any detail in sister provinces. I find that surprising but be that as it may. One argument is you do autopsies and you say this person was killed because their head hit the dashboard at such and so velocity.

The other problem is that has to be correlated in some meaningful statistical way and no one seems to be able to produce or to admit - people who are working in he field admit that their data doesn't really prove anything. The only other way to prove something is to build an experimental model, smash a car into a barrier, roll it, whatever, and measure what happens. Quite frankly, you can set it up so that obviously a belt saves you 100 percent, or 99.9 percent of the time, in a particular kind of crash that you set up.

The problem with that is, if that works, then it should show up in jurisdictions that have had the temerity to actually legislate belts. If you are going to have a predicted fourfold decrease in accidents, and in deaths and what have you, you should expect to see Ontario go, not from 1, 800 deaths to 1, 600, but from 1, 800 deaths to 800 or 900 deaths, and Ontario doesn't do that. Ontario showed a modest decrease in kills, just as we did, and you can attribute 100 percent of that to improved auto design, improved policing for drunks, and improved reduced road speeds and policing of those road speeds.

Actually, you can account for more than the benefit that they got. They should have been killing even less people if those factors alone worked. That's why I said to you, they had belts as well, but they didn't even get the benefit they should have got from the other factors. lt really looks as if belts were starting to be counterproductive. That means that the special engineering setups where you roll a car, do whatever you do, can only prove a very na rrow thing. I' ve been running a series of experiments for about eight years now just to prove one narrow range of phenomenon.

You have to get all the variables neutralized if you're running a careful scientific experiment. I hadn't meant to want to bore you with philosophy of science concepts, but you know the difference between faith and science, there's a feeling about it, but logically it's this. Something held on faith is held to be proven, but not disproven by physical experience; that's faith. For example, if I drive through a puddle and I don't drown, and I'm wearing a belt and I believe in belts, I say that proves that belts don't drown you.

If I say to someone else, but I know someone who went into a puddle and was drowned, and he says, oh well that almost never happens, don't count that. If I say, my cousin was in an auto accident, head-on collision, 12 people killed, he was in the death seat, the automobile block landed up where he was, he's alive today - a practicing physician actually - because he was thrown out the car through the windshield. They picked glass out of his face for a month, and he was in hospital for three months; but he's a useful member of society because he wasn't belted in.

I know a couple of attorneys in Winnipeg who were in side hits. One of them, he was thrown, as secondary impact he hit the driver, God forbid he hit the driver. 205 The car was totalled; he and the driver walked away. There was a property damage accident reported to Autopac, the car was a write-off, but not even a personal injury, but the car was 18 inches skinnier. I submit, when you're belted in and the car moves 18 inches and you don't move, you're in trouble. This man, not a scratch.

Other people have told me that they've witnessed side hits, minor accident, and the driver was killed, he was belted in, didn't have a chance. All I ask of the researchers is, where do you acc ount in your experimental models for the counter instances; and I'm told they don't bother because it's only a 1, 000 to 1 chance that ever happens. My God, I must know thousands and thousands of people who are alive because they wear belts; I don't know thousands and thousands of people in terms of my interchange with them. Now, that's only anecdotal and it doesn't prove a darn thing.

I could bring a hundred people here who believe that they were saved because they didn't wear belts, and people on the contrary side could do the same. What I am saying to you, an experimental model has to be able, if it's honest, to account for the negatives. Now a person who's got faith doesn't have to do that because experience proves, and is not allowed to disprove, faith. Aristotle - I'm paid to be a philosopher - was asked about the poets. The poets used to be important social figures in Greece like priests and physicians and legislators.

He was asked about poets and truth - he was talking about Greek poets. He said, poets lie a lot; poets speak to experience, but they don't allow counter instances to count; it's called poetic license. I have the feeling that a lot of our statisticians were really studying hum anities and studying a lot of poetry when they went to university.

Look, if something is to count for hard data it must be set in the context -it's called the verifiability criteria, I hate to even use terms like that with my students, so please bear with me - verifiability criteria wasn't really clearly identified until the 20th Century, although we recognize that all the bright scientists were using it for centuries. Verifiability criteria says unless there is some finite senuous experience that could disprove your claim the claim that you're making is not knowledge, you have no right to make it, it is not a verifiable claim; it's a poetic claim.

There must be admitted beforehand a scenario that someone will say if something occurs then it proves me right but, if it doesn't. occur, then I' m proven wrong. The man of faith says if God loves me he'll give me money, and then he didn't give me money; oh well, God must be punishing me for my sins, so no matter what happens it proves that God cares about me. The scientist says, if I've designed this car correctly it will get 50 miles to the gallon, and you drive it and you come back and say it only got 25; and if I say, well look, you have to drive it 100,000 miles, the average will be . . .

You say, hey, give me my money back; the car only gets 25. Someone must say to you, okay, in the next 24 hours, 10 gallons of gas will drive the car 500 miles, and it either does or it doesn't. Unless experience can prove the knowledge claim right, it's not verified; it's not science. We live in the day in which people dress up as specialists and they sell all sorts of things on television

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 and they appear to be making scientific claims, and there's all sorts of ways of hoking data, that I would submit to you that any claim that is made to you that can't specify how data could prove it wrong is not verifiable evidence. it's someone's fate, someone's poetry. Now, if you want to legislate deaths because of poetry, we're in bad shape. I hope you will be very careful when you consider the kind of evidence that has been given to you when people say that they have proven their case. I've been looking at a lot of poetry in these statistics.

This has been too overwhelming in terms of me just giving you the result of my sporadic-year study of these figures; but if you're serious, I'd be prepared to, as Paul Walsh earlier said, if you want to talk numbers, he'd be prepared to sit down and talk seriously to show you the serious, serious design flaws in these reports that claim benefits. I really know nothing about helmets, although I must say I've been very impressed by people talking about helmets.

Paul was briefed to talk about helmets; I wasn't briefed by anyone, but I have only examined belt statistics and I can honestly tell you that belts look dangerous. I would now like to present what I take to be the real formal problem that is presented to you, and I outline it in my brief. You have a copy.

The documentation was intially forwarded me by the Minister and I indicated my dissatisfaction with the brief that went to caucus, presumably the NDP and not to you guys on the other side, and I read what the Minister directed to me as being the bibliography, the back-up data that justified the caucus brief, and a good deal of the reports that I've cited to you were cited to me by the Minister and others in my correspondence with the ministry of the Department of Transport in Ontario; they forwarded it to me.

The only thing I couldn't get out of them - believe me, I tried, because I know they have it in their accident reports, the raw data - I asked them to break down the sober belts to the impaired belts and they won't do it. I tried to talk politely to them. They recognize what the problem is, because if any data shows up and it looks like it's there, it destroys the case that they made for belts, and I appreciate that benign neglect, was what the speaker this morning said.

Well, I don't know if it's benign neglect or not, but my efforts, I don't have enough clout to get the Ontario Government to push the buttons to run the study that would prove them wrong. There's a legal, moral difficulty that requires the government to respect the citizen's right to life. This is the one that clearly is going to lead to the justification for the Supreme Court challenge. When you're talking about life, you are talking about legislating in areas that clearly is not within the ultimate competence of the province. You can be challenged.

Point (2) - Given that unbelted persons are of no danger to innocent parties, the defense of the normal motivations for saying, hey, we're defending society at large, you really can't make the case there; so your normal impetus, people are saying do something, we have a problem. You're defending the people. You can't make the case there, and the people that you're trying to control are the people who have the capacity to control it themselves.

You can fly an airplane over the city and unless I get a bazooka and shoot it down, I 206 can't stop you; but you know darn well the majority of people, unless you enforce, it's a scofflaw. You have that problem, and you don't really have the justification for the legislation in terms of on behalf of the great, unwashed public. You might argue the dollars case, but I would suggest to you that the Ontario figures show that you don't have a leg to stand on to show that unbelted drivers cost you money.

You sure as hell can say drunks cost you money, but does this mean that the only reason the ICU is treating drunks is because it's saying they weren't wearing belts and you don't want to identify them as drunks? Are you prepared to say to a drunk, you pay your own medical costs? In those cases, I'd suggest that you better make a distinction between a drunk and a belted guy and an unbelted guy, because an unbelted sober is not costing you money. The drunk belted or the drunk unbelted is costing you a fortune, and me.

I'm not saying I should be so stingy as not to pay for the drunk, but if you think that the public interest has to do with dollars, you have the obligation to separate the people who are wearing belts from the people who are drunk, and we know that drunk drivers kill themselves too; drunk belt drivers kill themselves. So are you going to pay for a guy's medical because he was wearing a belt and drunk, but not if he was sober and not wearing a belt? You're going to have one hell of a challenge for that.

Point (3) - Paternalistic technical difficulty requires the legislator to produce conclusive evidence that intervention is a clear and overwhelming benefit. In one of my other guises, I teach philosophy of law.

When you look to the theory of paternalistic law, and this is clearly paternalistic law, and I'm not saying it's pejorative, some of you may be more enthusiatic about the theory of paternalistic law than others; but the procedure, and it's good procedure, because if you violate the norms that have been generated, those norms weren't generated for some airy-fairy reason, the requirement for the paternalist to make his case is precisely to avoid scofflaws, to avoid the majority of the popu lace thinking the legistors are idiots and evil and all the other nasty things that they say, and at some point we have society breaking down.

The prudent thing, the decent thing, the honourable thing and in fact the only thing that you can do if you want to have a strong law that is really observed, is to make your case when you bring in paternalistic law. For this reason, the Federal Government has been spending millions of dollars on propaganda, and I can show you the studies that have to do with social engineering, nothing to do with whether belts work, but how you get a public opinion poll to show that you have 55 percent of the public believing belts work. We in Manitoba have been subjected to that for the last 12 months. You've seen the ads.

The media people tell me they're coming in where they have conferences here and they tell us how good they are. That's part of the campaign to justify paternalistic legislation. This is what they did in Ontario, and this was a Tory Government - evil Tory Government - 40 percent of the populace thinks belts are good; they wouldn't touch it. They educated the public. When they got over 50 percent, then they brought in the law. So it's prudent - I'm saying it's prudent, but now that's only the propaganda part of it. The substantive part - and this

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 is where it's going to hurt you - partly because you've got a bunch of organized people in Manitoba who are going to take you through the courts; you're going to have to prove not in some public opinion forum that's manipula ted by a bunch of slipped publicity that our Federal Go vernment got seco nd-hand from Washington; you're going to have to go to a court of law with the rules of evidence and prove that when you say you're going to reduce injuries four times, that you're doing it. You can't do it because the data doesn't support you, and so on.

I would suggest that there's a problem in terms of the concept of a paternalistic law. You can make it in terms of momentary public opinion, but I would suggest to you just as a year of publicity being manipula ted from wherever it's been manipula ted from might temporarily increase the perception on the part of the pu blic that laws, yes, I guess they're probably good even if I'm not going to wear them.

In a court case, it would be reported in terms of hard data, the case could not be made and you've got to convince a judge and ultimately a Supreme Court Judge, that when the MMA tells you all these wonderful things that happen with belts, if you don't got the data, you don't have a case arguing on paternalism. So, that's another problem you have. I was just saying, if you want to bring in legislation, what are your problems?

Point (4) - and it's not polite to talk politics - but sometimes we see on television the Leader of the Opposition or one of the members opposite, hard words or flamboyance - and given that we know that you're going to ha ve someone wear ing a belt, getting themselves killed every week if you have a 50 percent user rate, can you imagine a coloured photograph in some of our more flamboyant newspapers, the kill of the week, box score for the year, every week a government that cares about its people, a Minister who wants safety on the highways, compels people to put on a belt.

Really, in terms of respectable argument, I mean that's not where philosophers are at, but in terms of rhetoric, I just ask you to, in common sense, be cautious. Figure out what the heck you're doing. Now I said, seat belt dangers. I know people in perimeters of cars who clearly were better off because they weren't belted in. I'm prepared to admit some people are better off if they are belted in, but clearly there must be some accounting on both sides of the leger, and the reports that purport to tell you that belts are good don't even try to begin to make that case.

But we have enough data from the coffins in the ground, from the bodies in the hospitals, that it doesn't matter what euphemisms are used, we know that belts don't do what their proponents say they do. it's one thing for the government to put television ads on - and I can't fund those, I can't compete with that - but you're going to have to make that case in the law courts and that's where Department of Transport expertise, with all of its flimflamming, just doesn't hold up. Now, if climate and population and geography·mean anything, Saskatchewan looks like Manitoba.

Aren't you curious as to why they kill so many more people than we do? They did not lower their speed limits when they brought in belts. Other jurisdictions did the two things together and therefore had no statistical case to make. Unfortunately Alex Bazylewsky, who has the office next to me, who is professor of statistics, he begged me, he said, hey , when you're making your brief, Levine, I want to make a eo-brief - because he's been feeding me a lot of some of my reports and he is aghast. The social scenario is this.

The people who get A's from professors such as Professor Bazylewsky, go and work for Great-West Life or insurance companies in the states who won't write up any helmet legislation, and the people who are more marginal students - to put it politely - tend to work for some of these agencies that are turning out some of these reports. He would have failed them in his class, turning out those reports. Bazylewski should be making the case and I don't have the technical terms to show you with ten-syllable words why they're not doing what they should be doing. I have to talk in simp ler, perhaps more florid language.

The only province that put in belts, didn't change their speed limits - Saskatchewan - and okay, people want to go and count corpses and say why did this corpse die and why did that corpse die, and I have lots of engineering reports and some projects I've been in and every time a researcher looks at a bunch of evidence, he says, this is what it shows, I recommend more research. That's the nature of researchers in any field, period. But surely, common sense, it's prudent - why did Saskatchewan mo11e all the way up to 295 when we were down in the 180's, in the year that they brought in belt legislation?

Surely, you should be nervous. Is the same thing going to happen in Manitoba? I really fail to follow the conclusion in the caucus document, given the num bers that actually exist. Now the Ontario statistics - and I've given you sort of a rundown of the numbers that exist - they show the belted drivers cause property damage accidents. In other words, if you say what Ontario calls "belted" and what Ontario calls "unbelted," for every belted driver who's got in an accident, for every nine drivers who are belted and the police say they had an accident, one driver is unbelted and had an accident.

I don't know if you believe that statistic or not. But I find it inconceivable that Autopac wants to tell someone that because they weren't wearing a belt that Autopac shouldn't have to pay for its insurance. In Ontario, when we know that they only have a 50 percent belt rate, if the rates are anything like 90 percent of those accidents caused by belted drivers, I should get a discount, a healthy discount, because I don't belt up. I'm not suggesting I really should, but I am saying these people are talking conclusions that are Wizard of Oz, it's poetry, pure poetry.

If Aristotle was here, he'd say - well, what would he say? - and they do it a lot. 207 Ontario says belted drivers are reported to be hospitalized more frequently than unbelted. The only way that Ontario can, on one category, say that unbelted drivers are more at risk, is to lump in all of the drunks - now these are identifiable - Ontario identifies about 40 percent drunks in these fatalities. lt says probably another 10 percent or 12 percent were impaired and that all those people on drugs, all those people, who for one reason or another, they couldn't get any hard evidence on, don't count.

I understand that out in California - now maybe California is bigger into dope than we are - they're thinking that 85 percent drivers are impaired when they get kills. How dare anyone lump in impaired drivers - and we know these impaired drivers don't belt up, or tend not to belt up, I mean, some of them do - we

Thursday, 28 Jqly, 1983 lump. those in and then say unbelted drivers are unsafe. That's hogwash. Im paired drivers are unsafe and that's the fact. No one has made the case because it certainly looks as if it can't be made that sober, unimpaired drivers who don't belt up are a danger to anyone. Indeed, the case looks suspiciously as if you're better off if you're not impaired and I must say that's a strange conclusion, but I am driven to that conclusion by the data - and this is data not generated by people who are against wearing belts - this is data that the people are producing who are in favour of belts.

And even then, they get a fairly neutral - well it's not neutral - but making reasonable allowance for the known factors of drunks and what the actual belt rates are, we get the surprising statistic that flips the danger rate in favour of unbelteds, instead of being in favour of belteds. I am not for a moment saying that I have conclusively made the case, that anyone is an idiot who wears a belt.

But I am saying there is a strong reasonable presumption that belts are dangerous and the onus for those getting prepared to generate paternalistic legislation, the onus is on you - you, the legislators - to clearly make the case that you can support the MMA. And when you tell me that you are going to reduce my accident rate four times, you'd bloody well better have the data to show that you can do it. If you can't back up what our medical friends have been claiming then you don't have the case for paternalism. Now that's Point (4). Point

(3) Given the above, the burden of argument requir ed to ju stify paternalism, I think, is unsurmountable. The case has never been made and in that light it's disappointing to discover that our Health Sciences researchers don't make the critical distinctions - impairment or unempairment of ICU patients; maybe some of them do. I was talking to one casually and I asked him what the ratios were. He said, we don't keep those numbers we're not interested. My God, how can you be against belts, Levine?

I've got lots of friends who - my wife at cocktail parties says don't start talking belts because they see the corpses every day, they live with the blood. I must say I feel it's kind of unfair to sit at a distance of an ivory tower of a philosophy room and say, I'm just looking at the numbers. I know they represent human beings but you've got to imagine the human beings who will be put at risk. You're sitting a far distance away, too.

If you legislate belts and people start dying in increasing numbers, as they appear to in other places, that's a horrendous thing to happen; and you have that obligation not to act, given that there is no data that really substantiates these wild claims that you're going to drastically reduce killings, you're going to drastically reduce whatever, because no one has ever done that when they've moved to belts, no one. Given that others haven't, why should we? Are we somehow different laws of physics and life expectancy hold for Manitobans?

We're flesh and blood; we may be a little better than Ontario but, you know, we're human beings. Now here is the kicker. People have been saying, we have an epidemic, we have to do something. Well, I'd wonder where the epidemic is. The epidemic appears to me in terms of drunks, if there is an epidemic. We appear to be containing it in terms of our rates because we killed less people in the last few years than we did years previous, given that we're not here dealing with 208 a drug whose side effects are unknown.

Look, you bring in a drug and you don't know the side effects, and then five years later you know the side effects so you withdraw the drug; that's one thing. But if you know the side effects beforehand and choose to ignore them, if you're a drug company you get hauled through the courts. You legislators know the side effects of what happens when you put on a belt because Ontario tells you what happens; other jurisdictions tell you what happens. You can't pretend that people are not going to be killed wearing belts.

You can, hopefully, if you vote in favour of belts, say many people will be helped, so if I kill some I save some, and I'm going to play God. Not that I'm squeamish but because I believe the evidence isn't even that good, and because you have the obligation for far better evidence, you shouldn't be moving on this. But I find the propaganda contemptible because sometimes, although it's true that sometimes a belt will save a life and sometimes, you know, 80 mph belt, no belt, the chances are that's it.

Although a gentleman the other night told me he was in 12 0 m ph car accident, drunk, unbelted, and walked away, had some mouth damage. I just said, well, I don't really have any sympathy for that. The cases show clearly that there are times when you are killed because you wore a belt, and I have di fficulty taking serio usly anyone who won't acknowledge that reality. That's why I tend to get angry when I'm talking to some people in research. lt's like a doctor who says this pill has absolutely no side effects. My God, how many thalidomide people have we seen walking the streets?

The physicians believe that they didn't have side effects; they didn't knowingly impose that consequence upon people. But we know that you are going to generate corpses if you force everyone to wear a belt, whoever is forced to wear a belt. lt's a risk, it's like playing roulette. You can tell people they should play roulette but I don't think that you have the legal right, I think it's ultra vires since you're talking about a life and death situation.

We've got a prescription here that has potential lethal affects, and you people are attempting to put yourself into the place of compelling someone to take medication that has potential lethal side effects. I would submit to you that it's on that ground that you have no business legislating; and it's on that ground that, in terms of the principles of natural rights, that you will lose, in the higher courts of the land, if not in our Manitoba courts. I don't think there's a social right or benefit that can justify what it is that belts represent.

The important fact - I've been talking in inverse to what I really care about and, as a philosopher, believe me the principles of freedom are really what I think are worthwhile, but other people have made that case. Philosophers in talking about knowledge and talking about life, maybe we're rebels. Again, since I'm a philosopher, Plato asked the question - who has the best knowledge? He was talking about belts of a sort. I mean philosophers can find belts everywhere.

Plato was talking about the reins of a horse, not a casual horse, a horse you lead into battle and your life is on the line when you're fighting for your country. Who has the best knowledge of the horse's r eins, the guy who makes the reins, who thinks he knows everything about it and the rider doesn't know a damn thing, or the

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 rider? Plato unequivocally says the rider. The rider tells the one who makes the belts what it should do, and how it performs. The rider decides when to use a device, and when not to. lt's his life, he isn't going to casually or stupidly, generate ignorance about those reins that have to do with his life. Now, obviously you go into war, you know, hey, this is a life-and-death situation.

But belts are a life-and death situation thing, and I would suggest to you that, in terms of the thousands- of-year-old heritage of civilization that we sometimes lay claim to in the western world, that we've got it from way back that we trust the user because the user has the best knowledge. Now look, the citizens right to life is fundamental in our society. We have a society in the common-law tradition that's rebelious. We restrict the sovereigns right to tell us what to do from King John and Magna Carta right on.

In a Liberal democracy there are certain restrictions on legislators, it's called constitutions and what have you. Martial law countries, Code Napoleon which is a military code. You have dictatorial law and this is the problem that we faceed when I was in law school many years ago, being entertained by the likes of Bora Laskin, and I have great respect for him.

He made the point that there's a real problem because we are generating legislated law on the Code Napoleon model, and yet we're a common-law tradition that says the law is what the judge says it is in a court of law when you had adversaries making their case. We, all the time, have the problem, how far can the Legislature go before the judges say - sorry that's not a law. You can say it's a law, but until I, the judge, say it is, boom, out. This is a philosophical problem, but it's one that is, in this case, not merely theoretical and philosophical, but it's one that you have to concern yourselves with.

Because belts can kill the philosophy of natural right. Now this basically says nature. I don't ask you for the permission to get born; I have a right. There's certain natural rights that are inherent in the fact that I exist as a human being. This is why we grant certain rights to people from Pakistan who are in Canada, even if they aren't Canadian citizens, because we recognize that as human beings they have inherent rights; one of the "natural rights" because, if you infringe upon the right to life no other rights exist.

That's why the natural right, it's called a natural right to life, because all other rights are subsidiary. So the fundamental right, and whether this is Canada, U.S. or Russia or anywhere on the doctrine of natural rights, the right to life is fundamental, and we have a nice long tradition in common law of thinking that that makes a fair bit of sense. So even before we had a Charter of Rights and I take it, although I'm not an attorney, that the Leader of the Opposition, when he was arguing on our common law tradition, had something in mind like we had our common law that could protect us.

So that's one of the legs of an argument, and any one of those legs is enough to demolish the seat belt case. One of the legs is the natural right to life and I think you can't oversurmount that; but it just happens to technically perhaps be a little easier because we have this nice new bauble, the Canadian Charter of Rights, that says we've got a right to life. All it is doing is spelling out what was there in natural rights and common law anyhow. You really, as legislators - partly, it's a technical problem - but really you're confronting what do you 209 think Canada as a liberal democracy is about?

When you start to legislate something that can interfere with a person's life, that can take a life as a provincial legislator, you are ultra vires; I mean that's it. I would invite you to consider seriously that these are real problems, not imaginary problems, and that everyone - the people who are making up these poetic num bers and people like myself who are saying, hey, that doesn't prove anything - we all agree, and you agree too, half of our kills are from impaired drivers, and maybe 85 percent, but that's where the problem is. We heard that frightening statistic.

I heard from insurance people 8,000 drivers are driving in Manitoba without licences. If we get people to take blood tests, so we find out that they're drunk and take their licence away, are we going to change anything? So we'll have more drivers driving without licences. The problem isn't to identify and take away a licence. I guess I am very draconian here. I would like to respect everyone's rights, but say, darn it, if you are driving without a licence or if you're involved in a fatality, you go to jail; we take away your car, we sell your car, and that pays for your jail stay.

Maybe you would have to worry about people who are renting cars, but you could have a fine equal to the cost of incarcerating someone, because I don't think the taxpayer should pay to incarcerate someone. Now, I am told that is not politically acceptable, but I believe the majority of Canadians, even those who drive drunk, know that they shouldn't be. My God, 81 drivers in a 168 fatality accidents, or 168 fatalities in accidents, 81 without licences!

We know that the majority of kills are from people who are drunk, so maybe the guys without licences are all - well, only 37 were identified as being drunk, but we know that in Ontario 50 percent of the kills are from people who identifiably have enough booze to slow them down. At least 38 percent of the kills are from guys who are stoned out of their minds. That's where the real problem is, and I don't think anyone is denying that there is a real problem.

I don't think you would have the public on your backs if you were really hard-nosed about doing something about a driver who has the unmitigated gall to drive when he doesn't have a licence and he got his licence taken away because he was irresponsible and drunk on the road. I don't think anyone would cry any crocodile tears if you took someone who had killed someone in an auto accident and say sorry, baby, you were at fault, 30 days in the slamm er, and we're taking your toy away from you; you don't have a car. If you get another one and drive it within a year, we'll take it away too.

If you brought in that kind of legislation, you would only be imposing a penalty on people who had proven that they were dangerous. You would not be imposing a penalty on honest, law-abiding, conscientious citizens. I can tell you, I, and I know hundreds of people who intend to break your seat belt law, who intend to say no. I don't want to particularly mix politics, many of them are NDP supporters, or were. I don't know if you start giving them tickets and branding them criminals, and they start joining organizations and fighting you through to the Supreme Court.

That's political, that's really beneath the tone of the argument that we should be talking about. But I would suggest to you that seat belts are not only a neutral red herring; they are diverting you from

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 what you should be doing, and they are generating inocent people's deaths. I for one will not be one of those inocent people slaug htered by seat belts. As an experiment today to see what I was complaining about, I wore my belt, but only for about 60 seconds because it kept putting pressure on me. When I released it, it tightened again. I am told that if I play around with the spring release mechanism, I am breaking the law. I have to leave it as the manufacturer gives it to me. I can't drive my car with it. Now it may be that this Audi Fox has a bad . . .

I should tell the factory to give me a new belt, but I don't intend to do that because the data doesn't tell me that a belt in working order helps me. My belt causes me pain when I put it on. My belts cause my daughter not to be able to see over the hood of the car. She believes that if she can't see, she's more a danger than if she can see. She drives without a belt because she intends to see when she drives. She's a short kid; G.M. builds little seats. She puts a wedge under her and she can only sort of use the wedge and look forward without the belt. When the belt's on, it sort of pins her back.

My wife is also short and she has the same problem. I know some people who are conscientious belt users and they shop around for a car that's the right proportions for them, but look at the problem. A car that's suited for a five-footer isn't for a six-footer, and a lot of people are five foot and six foot and they're married to each other. Who buys the car? Only one of them is going to have a compatible belt. You go on and on and on; it just looks ridiculous.

I am prepared to say if someone can find a car and a belt and has the belief that for them a belt is a good thing, I wouldn't stop them, but we know the state of the art of technology is such that we are going to be generating corpses from people who otherwise would have been alive, and those corpses are going to be hanging out of belts. Whoever is going to be waving those photos, I can tell you, if I am going to court, I'm going to be waving all the photos I can. That's self defense at that point, because I'm going to be driven to rhetoric because Plato tells me that's what happens in the law courts.

Well, I apologize for going on overly long. Have I exhausted you? MR. CHAIRMAN: Any questions? Ms. Phillips. MS. M. PHILLIPS: Mr. Levine, at the risk of sounding paternalistic, which, as a feminist, it's a horrific thought for me. MR. E. LEVINE: Maybe we need a new term. MS. M.

PHILLIPS: You were talking about if all those drunks, whether they were belted or unbelted, are causing accidents and, of course, I agree that drunken drivers are a major factor and an overwhelming factor; you are saying it doesn't matter whether they wear seat belts or not, or there is some dispute as to whether, if they are really drunk, they bother to put their seat belt on or not. I guess I'm concerned about ... 210 MR. E. LEV INE: No, the data shows that drunks don't belt up. The drunks who are sober enough not to get in accidents belt up at roughly half the rate of the daytime sober population.

That's all I can say from the Ontario Blood Alcohol Count Study. MS. M. PHILLIPS: I guess I'm worrying about the people, sober or otherwise, or drivers or passengers that they are colliding with. I don't think you have or anyone else so far in these hearings has talked about whether it's just the drunks that get killed, or whether they are killing other people who might be their passengers or passengers in other cars. There is nothing that sort of puts all that together that I've heard so far. MR. E.

LEV INE: Clearly, drunks kill other people, but my point as it bears upon seat belts is the drunk - it doesn't matter to me - now I would prefer they not to be drunk and not hit me. But, if someone is actually hitting me at a certain angle at a certain velocity with a certain vehicle - after he's hit me, it really doesn't matter whether he is a Martian with 10 heads, a sober minister or a drunk stoned our of his gourd. The question that I have to worry about is, am I going to survive the accident?

In looking at the data that I've looked at, it looks as if I am more likely to be hospitalized if I'm belted up when this Martian or drunk or whoever hits me. MS. M. PHILLIPS: Excuse me. More likely to be hospitalized than killed, or more likely to be injured? MR. E. LEVINE: No, no. More likely to be hospitalized than not hospitalized. If I then ask the question, what happens to the total populations who are sober and unbelted? Now maybe what we are now looking at is that sober, unbelted drivers probably avoid getting hit more than drunk, unbelted drivers, but I don't know how much it is going to help or hurt me.

I mean, there was that argument on the Air Canada flight that those people who were so drunk that they couldn't open up their belts, burned. Then the question was, were they so drunk it didn't matter anyhow? Clearly under some circumstances, if you're drunk and belted up if you're drunk enough, you just sit there while you burn to death. I mean, it's a bit gruesome, that DC9 that burned. These things happen. So there is nothing to show that I am going to be better off, from what I can see, if I'm wearing a belt and I'm hit by a drunk or I am hit by a sober person.

The point is, if I am hit, on the average - now sometimes I would dearly - if I'm going to have a front hit at 70 miles an hour, gee, I want a belt. I really do. But now the problem is, given the particular car I drive and the way the belts work on that car and everything else about that vehicle, do I want to be belted in to start with. I have to admit - well I guess I won't be charged because ... I was in a situation last winter. I did the stupidest driving in my life. I passed a truck on the road to the ski resort on a two-lane highway.

I was blinded by the snow, and it was stupid of me, and the truck was doing 40 miles an hour and I was doing 55 in oncoming traffic,

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 and I braked and cut in behind the truck. Given the road, I started to fishtail, five times on either side, wheel lock to wheel lock very quickly. Knowing the belts in my car, I know that I would have been slowed down a fraction of a second in going back and forth. Given the way my car responded, I know that in that accident the car would have flipped over. I would have lost all my pricey skis on the roof. The car likely would have been wiped out.

The real danger is that the car, as it was skidding upside down, would have gone into the opposing lane of traffic, and I don't know how many people would have likely been killed, but I am convinced - now I can't prove anything - that the not wearing of the belt caused me to avoid an accident. I am prepared to say, I was a bloody fool for getting into that tight situation, but I know my car. I know that in that situation, a belt would have possibly killed. Certainly it would have been a horrendous accident. Now that didn't generate anyth ing for Autopac, because I pulled the car over to the side.

I caught my breath. Everyone else in the car swore at me. I swore at myself, and I drove sedately to the ski hill. The wearing of a belt - now this is what I'm saying - on average, you have to have some model for accounting for when wearing a belt is a negative. Then you say on balance, the negatives and the positives, if the negatives and the positives weighed out to show you, you were one-quarter as likely to be injured as the MMA reportedly claimed, or if you're only one tenth of one-thousandth or half as likely to be killed as some other, there are a variety of claims made.

If they could show the net benefit, that's one thing. But no one accounts for all of these people who are walking around who never made it to the statistics table at Autopac, because they never reported themselves killed or broken in part or in the hospitals. Now the only way you can make that claim is to actually do the body counts in the hospitals, and start to identify where they came from. This is where I have the problem. Ontario says, we have the body counts. Two out of five in the hospitals are there. They didn't wear belts.

But we, damn it all, know that more than that are there, because they were boozed-up. Boozed up drivers probably weren't wearing belts. We then have the problem, three out of five are in the hospitals, and they were wearing belts. Now I ask you. In a car that has passengers - now we're just talking about passengers now - the passengers are more likely to get into hospital wearing belts than not wearing belts in Ontario. Now Ontario reports that as a good thing, because they say, 80 percent of the people are wearing belts. Actually it's 75 percent for passengers - they admit a lag.

But we know that doesn't happen. We know the passengers are belting at about a lag of 5 percent. That means, if it's a little over 50 percent for the drivers, it's a little under 50 percent for the passengers. You have to then look at those hospital wards and say, of the half of the drivers that are in the hospital or of the 60 percent of the passengers who are in the hospital who were wearing belts, hey, you're only half of the passengers.

That means that when the car got hit, you were more likely to wind up in the hospital if you had been wearing a belt when the accident occurred than not. 211 Now don't ask me to identify further the psychological state of the driver who was belted up, because I've had drivers in this town - some of them are engi neers and good friends of mine - they say they belt up and they feel somewhat like these macho motorcycle helmet problems. Evidently, other people who habitually belt up report a similar kind of psychological phenomenon. I hadn't really thought of it, since I don't belt up.

But they tell me, they feel somewhat invincible. They drive five miles an hour faster. They feel they can get in and out of a tight situation. They feel they've got protection. They admit to me that when they don't wear their belts, they drive slower. Now I don't know if that's the reason why people who are in cars - and typically, if the driver isn't belting up, others won't and if the driver belts up and says, belt up or I won't take you anywhere - so I don't know if the reason why a belted-up passenger is more likely to wind up in the hospital than not is because the driver was more reckless.

But that's irrelevant from your standpoint, because all you've got to know is, for whatever reason - and there are a myri ad, the psychology of the driver, whatever reason, because you'r e only dealing with the macrocosm, not the microcosm of an individual accident. You are dealing with the population of Manitoba. All I can say to you is, we don't know what belts do in the population of Manitoba, because we don't have the experience and your researchers can't tell you.

The only thing they can attempt to do is to do an honest extrapolation, and the extrapolation that's the best one in Canada is Ontario, because they are so much bigger than us. They are so close to us, and they've got the num bers. But their numbers tell you that for 3,000 people in the hospital, 1, 800 of them were belted up. If you want the num bers for passengers, they're somewhat similar to those for drivers. They're in Ontario Motor Vehicle Accident Facts '81, and they break down by age groups. There are all sorts of breakdowns.

The fundamental problem is that those people who wear belts are the preponderance of people who are in the hospitals. Now that's according to Ontario Police. MS. M. PHILLIPS: May I interrupt? When you say a preponderance of them are in the hospital, are you saying that the others, the other 40 percent . . . MR. E. LEVINE: They were the people who weren't wearing belts; 60 of a 100 people in the hospital were wearing belts. Sixty were wearing belts, 40 were not wearing belts, according to the reports. I make no comment on the reports. MS. M.

PHILLIPS: The question I have deals with the people that didn't end up in the hospital after accidents - the accident rate versus the injury rate - and the people ... MR. E. LEV INE: it's worse against the belts. it's more in favour of the un- belts. MS. M. PHILLIPS: What I'm wondering is, how many in accidents end up in hospitals with injuries, how many end up dead and how many end up walking away? MR. E. LEVINE: You've got the numbers there.

Thursday, 28 "'""''• 1983 MS. M. PHILLIPS: The ones that you gave us on this chart. MR. E. LEVINE: Okay. We know half the people in Ontario are wearing belts and half aren't, from independent studies that goes out and counts drivers. Now if it's 53, 54 or 58 percent, it roughly averages out, over everyone in cars and wearing belts, over the whole thing, city driving, highway driving, expressway driving, the whole bit, it's ballpark 50 percent and I won't fight for 5 percent because it really doesn't matter, in terms of what we're talking about here, as a principle. Half wearing belts, eh?

Can you imagine Autopac getting claims from the half wearing belts, 268,049? What about the other half who weren't wearing belts - that dangerous bunch of maniacs with all the drunks in it - 31 ,203? The belted drivers reported nine times as many accidents.

I quite frankly am skeptical about the figures but as I'm saying, these are the figures used to generate the claims of the MMA and the claims of the people who are telling you to put belts in and I'm prepared - now maybe this is a ploy - I am prepared to say, I'll accept your figures. lt's the same as going into a law court. lt's very inappr opriate to say a police officer is a liar. Take whatever he says and show that they don't have a case. I am using, if you will, the people who say that seat belts are good. This is their figure. Now here's what I've done that they would say is a no-no.

I have said there's a 50 percent user rate and I have cited to you Ontario report after Ontario report after Ontario report, but this document does not cite those Ontario reports at 50 percent user rates, or 60 percent user rates, or 70 percent user rates, this report - and I didn't do it deliberately to mislead you, it was just my Xerox machine just couldn't do the full page and it's in green print in a belt at the bottom of the page here and I'll read the small print to you - "In 19 81, 80.1 percent of the drivers of all motor vehicle accidents were using their seat belts and 9.3 not using them, as opposed to 80.3 percent of the drivers in 1980 who were using their seat belts and 9.1 were not." Well, if you believe that statistic of 9 percent were not using belts, then you can say four times as likely to be injured, my son, if you weren't wearing a belt; but then you've got the problem.

If that's really true Ontario should have, with 80 percent of the drivers belted up, they shouldn't have been killing 1, 800, they should have been killing about 400. They shouldn't have been injuring thousands, but hundreds. I am saying to you that if you really wanted to talk num bers, the num bers used here are cooked, but here is what the problem is. If these numbers are cooked, then the case made by the medical people, by the research people, when they tell you the great things that belts are going to do, it's based upon this cooked data. I am saying to you, a reasonable

interpretation of the data would accept that you got a body count in the hospital; would accept that you got a body count of corpses in the ground; would accept the counts of people wearing belts from researchers who have gone out and counted belts; and putting that together I am saying to you, you then have the horrendous result that the belts no longer look like they're good things, but 212 bad things.

I'm sorry, I don't with great relish, say that people in other professions have done something that looks disreputable but they have. lt was just in the news, the politicians who threw billions of dollars at airplanes, it was the same level and integrity of research, the researchers in a corridor with the politicians in the next room would tell me what the truth was, but with the politicians in front of the desk, the airplane will work. They've had five years of salaries in the interim and they're not getting fired when the airplane doesn't work; they're getting reassigned to another research project.

So I would urge you to have a great deal of caution for people who have accepted, as apparently our Manitoba doctors have accepted, with naivety that I find incredible. The conclusions that are presented in a document that, quite frankly, I find these documents far more sophisticated than the caucus document that was originally sent to me, but they all have the same fundamental flaws. They really don't hold up to what would qualify as a verifiable study.

In other words, something that you would be justified in committing your dollars to if you were making an investment in terms of whether you should build an airplane or committing people's lives to if you were being asked to legislate. I have attempted to work throug h, despite the weaknesses of the num bers game. I mean, we can still reasonably say that people do belt up when you have compulsory legislation. You can reasonably quadruple the participation rate - I have no quarrel with that kind of figure - because that has been justified and bonafide.

But when people then say there are other results, that you're going to get fewer kills, you're going to get fewer people in hospitals, the numbers aren't there and indeed they look the other way around and that's why I have the problem. I understand you're going to vote on this in a very short while but it took me some time to digest what was going on with these figures and I don't know that I've really been as cogent as I could in explaining the weaknesses of these reports and what the real picture looks like. You can say you take it on faith - and who's Levine? - and you've got 27 other experts.

I'm just outlining to you what's coming down, in terms of, if you proceed with the legislation, these are the difficulties that are going to confront you after the legislation is brought in. To my mind these are such horrendous difficulties - and I don't think the case has been made for this particular way of controlling the traffic problem - that the prudent course would be to table or to abandon this course and to look at where we do know the problems are and to control those people who don't have licences and I really think you should charge them for keeping them in jail.

Do something that would be of an obvious benefit. A driver in jail isn't going to kill anyone while he's in jail, but these seat belt things - besides the political thing of looking at a corpse of the week, in blood and gore, hung in, week after week after week after week in the Legislature, and at the end of that 50 weeks or so, you call an election and the public may or may not respond to it -besides the political ramifications, I think the prudent thing is just to pull back and come up with an alternate course of action. I'd much rather be more positive.

The only other time in my 18-year sojourn in the province that I - you guys

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 will hate me on this - but I asked the Legislature to bring in a housing Ombudsman and you brought in the Rentalsman legislation. Now I disagree with some aspects of it I don't agree with the rent control part, but for there to be an adjudicator to make our society a more liveable place to have an adjudication outside of the law courts between landlords and tenants, I thought was a good thing and I felt I was doing something positive.

This, I think, is positive because I think society will be a better place for not having the legislation; but despite appearances to the cont rary, it doesn't give me any great joy to stand up and say this is bad and other people aren't doing their job. I only do it because I think the consequences of not doing it would be unacceptable to me. So it's kind of an obligation that I, with reluctance, have accepted that I should speak on this issue. I don't know if my motives mean anything. MR. CHAIRMAN: Any other questions? Mr. Orchard. MR. D. ORCHARD: Mr. Levine, I've got a comment first before I ask a question.

I think it would have been quite beneficial for all of our legislators to have the opportunity to listen to two presentations so far on this seat belt thing and both of them have been today. On the seat belt aspect, one was Russ Sharpe's earlier on this afternoon where he drew out the statistic of the 81 unlicenced drivers ... MR. E. LEVI NE: I was overwhelmed by that. MR. D. ORCHARD: . . . that was an incredible statistic to me, and then your perusal of the Ontario statistics also makes a very interesting food for thought.

I believe that it would make, and I realize I'm not faulting anybody for not being here because this committee is only struck with about a 20 percent membership of the House, but it would do all of those people very very good before they vote on this legislation to read the concepts that have been put forward on seat belts by yourself and by Mr. Sharpe today. Basically, just a recap on this Ontario statistic for '80 and '81, and deal with the year 19 81.

I don't think there is any question that the actual usage of seat belts is the 50 percent lt seems to me that in the footnote from the page you read from, they had to derive their 81 percent seat belt user fee because that's what they've got in the statistic here. MR. E. LEVINE: Because otherwise it looks as if people who are belting up are causing automobile accidents out of all proportion to drivers. MR. D. ORCHARD: Exactly. MR. E. LEVINE: I mean, if they don't put that in, my God, the No. 1 thing to do to get auto safety is to wipe out seat belts. So they had an imperative to put that in.

Other people more cynical have suggested, well, you know when people are making police reports, they're not going to tell the police they weren't belted up; so they're all lying. Now, if you start with the premise that all of the data is unreliable in an engineering term, what is the decimal 213 point - you can put a whole bunch of decimal points in, they don't mean anything; you've only got some that are reliable - but if you start off by saying that you've got no reliable figures, then what you have to do with all of these reports is burn them.

If I have to start from scratch, that doesn't bother me, but surely if someone is coming and saying we have a case that seat belts are good and then they turn around and say the case is based upon nothing, then the logic is so simple and overwhelming, and I believe - you know, I am not saying that the Ontario police are so stupid as to have results that are worth nothing, but that's the direction you go in.

I am not attempting to attack that basic data base, but if the basic data base is going to be attacked by the defenders of belt legislation, then at the same time they are demolishing the foundation of all of the briefs that they've been getting in favour of belts. Maybe that's sneaky of me to suggest that this is how it works out. lt just does. I didn't publish this; Ontario published it it's people who are trying to defend the belts who said to me, hey, but of course those are cooked data. I said but if that data is cooked, look at the consequences. The case then does not exist for belts.

In order to make the case for belts, the data had to be cooked app arently. That makes me suspicious, because if a man can't make an honest case - a used car salesman might tell you a lie about a car and it might be a great car nonetheless, but you're damn suspicious about buying the car if he's lied to you about it. I have lawyer friends who say the bottom line is forget about what it says in the contract; if you don't trust the man, the contract isn't worth anything. If you don't trust this data, then it's not merely one peripheral of 10,000 reports. This is pretty basic stuff.

If the data base for Ontario stats are going to be thrown out, then we don't have any data in Canada. I really don't think it's that bad, but I think you have to say it's reasonable to believe that maybe for the property damages, people were lying a bit, but by the time they get to the accident, belted in and carted off by ambulance drivers, you can start to have reliability for those figures. You obviously are not dealing with as precise figures as you would like, but you don't need it.

You have to get a feel for what happens to belted populations opposed to unbelted populations and then make a reasonable allowance for the impaireds. When you do those simple things, based upon the imperfect data that you do have because you're never going to have absolute; there is always going to be a researcher who says give me another year and a million dollars, I'll better data. The bottom line is that the case does not exist for belts. My problem is the bottom line appears to me that the belts are more likely to endanger me; me being a species of sober driver. Quite frankly, I'm selfish.

The researchers tell me something else. They hypothecate that the drunk drivers might be more safe but they say, when they get to it, that the first 80 percent of the drivers you're going to get are the sobers who don't cause a problem anyhow and there are 20 percent the problem drivers, and the 20 percent of problem drivers cause 85 percent of the problems. Those 20 percent of the problem drivers, and I was told that some of the guys at 4:00 in the morning when they're patching people up and trying

Thursday, �8 ��ly, 1983 to put their skulls back together, they say, goddamnit, I wish that slob had been sober enough. Gee, if he had only been sober enough that he had put a belt on; he couldn't have put a belt on, he wasn't sober enough, then he wouldn't have driven; we've got to do something. We can't get sobers off the road because darn it all, the police can't police them; we've got to do something. Put belts on them; I don't know if it'll help, but they're pretty desperate. it's tough work putting people back together at 4:00 in the morning who are all boozed up.

Look, if there is the admission that you are not getting that problem group to belt up anyhow, and belting up the other 80 percent is going to kill a whole bunch of people who otherwise would have been alive, then you get into the numbers game. Are you going to be exchanging 20 people in Manitoba to 50 percent belt rate; you're going to save 20 people? I'm not quarelling with the fact that after doing the autopsies, they found 20 people who would have been alive had they been belted in. I mean 40 in the whole population, 50 percent belt rate, 20 gain.

You're going to have to account for 20 corpses who otherwise would have been alive and, believe me, if they don't know now, after there's been a bit of publicity from a court case or so, the survivors, the relatives of those 20 corpses are not going to be happy. I hope they' re not happy because after looking at the data, I find it atrocious that on the basis of such - well, okay, I'll be polite - naive work that it looks as if we're going to condemn innocent people to death. As I say, the more horrendous cases, you're going to be condemning more innocents to death than you are going to be saving some.

The best case - and you have to make a whole lot of assumptions, and I don't feel comfortable that those are justified assumptions - but if you grant the belt fanatics a whole bunch of assumptions, the best case they can make is that for the 20 they're going to save, they're only going to kill 20, so the net result is neutral. But you have to grant them a lot of assumptions that I feel uncomfortable - you know, just as a numbers game, I feel they have to ask for too many concessions to make this scenario work.

I had a battle with my wife at two in the morning - she's off at the lake now and I'm in town - and I said, look, knowing what I know it may be a waste of time, maybe the votes are already in, there's an alternate strategy, say nothing, and just go fight it in the courts, but if there was any chance in reason bringing in alternate - because things are in flux.

You have the opportunity to bring in legislation that will change things. it's clear that knowing what we know about the drivers who drive without licences and who are drunk, that if you can cont.·ol them, you will do an awful lot, so I thought it was worth addressing you at this time. Well, my family puts up with my idiosyncrasies. MR. D. ORCHARD: Mr.

Levine, the other thing that has been an interesting statistic is the fact that in the Ontario, and obviously in Manitoba - well, no, I can't say Manitoba because we don't have the sophistication of statistics- that the not-in-use accident driver, there's probably a greater probability of being your drunk driver, as you say, who is not belted in. So, that's another very interesting thing. 214 MR. E. LEV INE: That jus t matches people's observations. They say well, of course, what did you expect?

Well, I say Ontario in the report to the Minister - it was a blue-ribbon report to the Minister - said it was a surprising result. The data exists in the Ontario BAC - Blood Alcohol Count Roadside Report. I've referred to it, if you want it it's in the pile over here if you have reason to want to look at it. MR. D. ORCHARD: Then, one final thing - I guess maybe I'm commending you on the four points on the first page of your brief are the issues under which, I think, any legislator must give serious thought before they vote on this bill. MR. E.

LEVI NE: I think they have to overcome each one of those separately, and any one of them is sufficient to be, in effect, a veto. On the first page I list them in order of what I take to be, in terms of the fabric of society, their substantive importance. I believe every single one of them is of sufficient significance to serve as a complete roadblock, and even if you could answer three, if one of them stood, the case couldn't be made. MR. D. ORCHARD: Mr. Levine, you also mentioned the philosophical argument of freedom to choose.

Some of the legislators defending this bill in second reading in the House said that we have to bring this kind of legislation in, and if I can just quote from the Minister's introductory remarks, he attributes that seat belt usage would have saved $1,068,144 in hospital costs alone. That argument has been picked up by legislators in this House to justify bringing in this measure and overriding the individual's freedom to choose. They say that has been an overriding factor.

From a philosophical standpoint, when we're dealing with an issue that is a self-protective measure - in other words, you're only protecting the individual from injury to himself; there's no defensive reason for this legislation in your second point - can you see a philosophical danger here in determining where governments stopped bringing in legislation because it might save the health care system, which is taxpayer funded? MR. E. LEV INE: In terms of principles, I must say it's very satisfying sometimes to take the high ground that Sid Green takes.

He thinks I'm crazy to start talking about numbers, because he says look you got 10 experts here, you got 10 experts against, and it's a mish mosh, and the whole thing is principles that you really care about anyhow.

I guess I'm enough of a pragmatist to say, Qkay, you take your stand on principles. it's like striking a budget for an organization; if you're on the board of an organization, you decide what the organiza tion's commitments are, what its policies are in terms of what it stands for, then you go and strike a ways and means committee, and you find someone to get a treasurer and you go and get money and you spend it according to your priorities. I guess if we have no priority for the category of individual freedoms, then we don't spend money for it.

I haven't really thought this through - but my first reaction would be, if we're a society that cares about freedoms, then we shouldn't flinch at spending some money for it.

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 If our first job is to have a neat package and lower mill rates and let everything else go, even kill some people if it's cheaper to kill them rather than to patch them up. But I really think this is sort of irrelevant in this situation, because after looking at the Ontario data, I should be saying to you guys, I want a reduction in my Autopac premiums because most of the guys going to the hospital are wearing belts.

If you tell me there's a million bucks out there, I'm going to say, show it in court, because the actuaries that Autopac is hiring ain't going to be as good as the actuaries who are working in the universities who are going to tear them apart. I think it's specious because they don't have the money, and that isn't an argument that Sid Green would touch because it's dirtyf MR. D. ORCHARD: That's what he means, incompetent. MR. E.

LEVI NE: Here's where I would say, if we really as a society in this felt so strongly and an absolute case could be made, if the case could really be proven - but I'd say they have to prove the case - that my free choice is going to cost my fellow citizens money, and they are so uptight about it that they ain't going to pay it. Look if I put - and I voluntarily put them in first - smoke alarms in my house because I thought there was a good thing - my insurance guy came along and said, hey, do you have smoke alarms? I said yes, he says, oh $1 5.00. I said that's all I paid for one.

He said, yeah, the insurance company is giving you a differential. If someone can really make a case that the differential exists, let him stick a dollar figure on and go on and stick it to the consumer when he pays his licence fees. But, boy oh boy, if he can't make the case, you can expect people screaming at the damn legislator who's getting greedy and forcing the safe part of the population to pay a premium to put the idiots into hospital and keep them in hospital because they were foolish enough to wear belts.

That's why I would be prepared to fight after looking at the figures, I'll fight on the high ground, I'll fight on the low ground, because I think both are defensible. If we are the kind of society we think we are - look, you show me a body in the ICU, I'm not going to say goddammit, I'm not going to pay for him, the fool should have known better.

In my poverty - my bank manager can tell you I owe money - even though I have debts, I am willing to pay a premium to live in a society that's generous, and what you're saying to me is the legislator saying, we ain't being generous anymore; the free ride's over; we're all going to be nasty, and we're going to calculate every time we talk to our neighbour what it's worth.

I would prefer to live in a more generous society, but I think if the society chooses not to be generous, then they'd better do their homework, hire a bunch of actuaries, and come up with a defensible premium, because if they charge a prem ium that can't be defended, I'm going to scream. Look, we make a decision, women live longer, are we going to give them the same pension rights? That's a political decision. We spend money on it. We make all sorts of decisions. Drivers who start driving and are male are going to be a burden on Autopac more than others. Do we charge them a premium as they used to?

I used to have to 215 pay a horrendous premium when I first started to drive, for all the other crazy drivers . I feel badly; for five or ten years I didn't have an accident and then I found out I was paying a horrendous rate that I didn't have to pay. I switched insurance companies and the very first month I had an $80 or $90 accident and, for good will, they paid it off immediately and I said, gee, I feel so badly, I gave all those other guys thousands of dollars and never had an accident. The first accident in my life, I said, I really don't know if I want to report it.

He said, of course report it, we'll pay right away. lt was good public relations for them but you can make an actuarial assessment and if you decide you don't have the political guts to be generous enough, charge a premium. There is a cost to being stingy. The quality of life, we're all a little bit impoverished, and when you look at the rest of the world, darn it all, we've got a darn good community going in Canada and in Manitoba.

Despite the outcome here - I might be very unhappy with the outcome, some people suggest that it's just going through the motions - but the fact of this hearing is a magnificent tribute to the kinds of things that, at its best, our legal system, our social system, is all about.

I have nothing but the highest regard for your capacity to put up with all the hours of presentations, because even if some people are cynics in saying you're only playing a game, the game at its best when it works is magn ificent, and you are part of a tradition that sometimes is breaking ground, sometimes not, but it's certainly worth an awful lot. If you wanted me to say, how many dollars will I pay on my income tax for the government to keep lights on in this building, you can go on and on and on. At some point you'd say are we going to be a sufficiently generous society to have a certain quality of life?

That's part of what we're talking about here. I would really feel impoverished a little bit if we started putting tax credits, or whatever, every time an individual made a decision. In some cases, I think it's reasonable if you could really show. But my problem is that the data shows that I should be asking all the drunks and all the guys who are belted up to give me a refund because I'm paying for their hospital costs rights now.

I'm not begging you to do that although, quite frankly, if you showed me the millions of dollars that you could be putting into other social welfare schemes that are going for the drunks, I might become stingy at some point and say goddamnit, I don't want to pay for them, but right now I'm sufficiently of a generous mood to say, leave that one, the important thing isn't the dollar one, it's getting fewer people killed, and darn it all, the people in favour of seat belts have not made the case. MR. CHAIRMAN: Anyone else? Mr. Usk iw. HON. S.

USKIW: Yes, I am fortunate, I assume I'm fortunate, in having this document brought to me today, and a letter from the Minister of Highways in the Province of Saskatchewan. lt appears to challenge the kind of analysis that we just heard from you, sir. I'm going to read one or two lines from it and ask you for a comment: "So this can be interpreted that an unbelted person is four times more likely to be killed, and 2.6 times as likely to receive serious injury than

Thursday, 211 .,f�ly, 1983 a person wearing available restraints." That's a report put together by the Traffic Accident Information System in the Province of Saskatchewan; fairly comprehensive document. The Minister empha sizes the need to use these devices. I'm very happy to have the suppor t of a Conservative Government in this regard, Mr. Chairman. MR. E. LEVINE: My single statistic that I cited on Saskatchewan was the one that was in your caucus report that indicated that they had moved from 263 to 295 kills the first year that they brought in belts.

I have seen another figure that someone else suggested to me that for, I believe '80-81, the out killed us combined for those two years, 160. I have not seen that report. My initial response would be I would want to consider it before really responding. Initially, I can only say that the conclusion of that report sounds just about identical to the conclusions drawn from this Ontario Motor Vehicle Accident Facts Report, that upon examination appear bizarre. HON. S. USKIW: I'm not saying they're not. MR. E. LEVINE: I'm not saying that Saskatchewan's is the same thing at all.

The conclusion that Saskatchewan is drawing appears to be the same as Ontario drew. All I'm saying is when the Ontario data is examined - I think Ontario is a better case because being almost 10 times our size, after 10 years in Ontario they've got data that would take us a hundred to get type thing. So when you're dealing with statistics that are pretty rough and ready, when you have a large volume of them you can start to draw generalizations with much more security and belief that you've got something firm. All I can say is that's a study that you didn't direct me to. As you say, you only got it today.

If there were any point to it I have sufficient curiosity, I wouldn't mind looking at it. Off the top of my head, I can't really say anything about that document. HON. S. USKIW: Mr. Chairman, I don't want to make much of it either because I don't know whether the analysis will add or subtract strength from the pro argument. One has to take probably two or three days to sit through this document before one can . MR. E. LEVINE: I can't do it this weekend. HON. S.

USKIW: . . . and even that may not be adequa te, but it appears to ha ve been a very comprehensive study of all factors contributing to accidents - road conditions, types of vehicles, urban, rural, alcohol related; it's all in here. MR. E. LEVINE: Ontario has been doing that for over a dozen years. HON. S. USKIW: There's an appeal by the Minister that we have to emph asize the use of safety devices in vehicles. I just thought I'd relate that to you for whatever it's worth. MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Uskiw. Anyone else? Thank you, Mr. Levine. 216 Phil Zubrycki. MR. P. ZUBRYCKI: Mr.

Chairman, with all due respect, there's a doctor here, Bill Ewart, and due to his commitments and so on, if you would allow it, could he speak in my place? MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, we have a number of people that all want to do this and since some people take a little longer than others, there's nothing this committee can do except to take them in rotation. You're next on the list. If you wish to give your preference up, fine, we'll put you on the bottom, we'll go onto the next one. Dr. Ewart will be after Thora Cartlidge. MR. P. ZUBRYCKI: Oh, I see, okay. I'll talk then. MR. CHAIRMAN: You'll pass? MR. P.

ZUBRYCKI: No, I've got some material. I just have some notes and things here. Mr. Chairman, and honourable members of the committee, I thank you for this opportunity to speak before you. lt seems I don't want to show any disrespect but this sort of reminos me of the four older gentlemen sitting around in a senior citizen's home talking to each other. One says, you know, I have trouble now reading fine print, my eyes are going. The other one says, well, you know that doesn't bother me, my eyes are real good; what seems to bother me is my hearing.

I really like nice music and everything and I can't hear too good anymore. The third one says, oh no, my eyes are good and my ears are good but I like to eat and you know I have all false teeth and I can't eat steak or corn on the cob anymore. The fourth one says, no, no, my eyes are good, my ears are good, my teeth are good but with me, well it's like this morning; me and the wife Edna we were in bed and I give her a little nudge and I said, Edna do you want to do it? She said, oh Henry, do we have to go through all that again? You see with me it's memory.

Unfortunately I've been involved in this for almost 20 years. I have a brief that I would like to hand out to you if you would like to pass it around. If you'll note the date on it, it's September 30th, 1965. That was one of the times I appeared before such a committee as this. lt seems that the government's memory must be going because we've gone through this before on the helmets. We've gone through it, and we've gone through it, and the things that we recommend, some of them have been done with good affect.

Manitoba was one of the first places in North America to have separate licensing for motorcyclists, but it seems that somewhere along the ways some of the things weren't done, yet we still want to put in this helmet legislation. Now we've heard all kinds of statistics. I've been sitting here for some days, you've been sitting here for some days, and really so what. So what do all the statistics mean? The fact is, gentlemen and ladies, I was a member of the Canadian Armed Service Reserve for 14 years. During that time I felt that if I was called upon I would give my life for my country.

In the Second World War how many thousands went overseas and gave their lives for freedom? My regiment, on June 6th every year they have a reunion to remember the men who fell on D-day and

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 during the war. This year I didn't go. We're having a centennial celebration this year and every time I go to sign the reply to the invitation to send it in, I don't do it. I am wondering, what did I do for 14 years? What did those thousands go overseas for? Would you have tried to pass a law like this in 1946, or 1948, or 1950? Maybe I'm a little bit fanatical about this but after 20 years of going through the same thing over, and over, and over again it just makes me wonder what is going on here. I don't know.

On June 6th, we have a toast to these men and we say, "We shall remember them." We shall remember them. Is this how we remember them? Now there are other ways that we can do this, rather than using some kind of totalitarian fascist boot. I was trying to think how I could, somehow, show this, you know, what I think. I'm not a politician and I don't really think that I can teach you anything about politics, but I was just doodling and I came up with a thing I would call a poly-cube. I also have copies of these for each person. Now if you look at that, I think there are different degrees of government.

We can go right down at the bottom. We always talk about right and left, about capitalism and socialism. Well, I think that's a two dimensional model, and what we really need is a three dimensional model because there is also anarchy and totalitarianism, or fascism if you want to call it that. I wonder where we stand in that matrix with this law? I don't know, I think that I certainly don't want to be up at the top in a totalitarian society but, by the same token, I don't want to be down at the bottom level living in a jungle of anarchy.

I think that the government is here to protect my rights, to protect my life, to protect my liberty, to protect the security of my person. By protecting the security of my person, I don't think putting a helmet on my head is what they mean. I mean that they mean that my security of my person will not be interfered with where it doesn 't interfere with someone else. You know, people come up and they say, well we have laws against bank robbery. That interferes with someone's right to free choice. Well, of course, it does, that's just a silly analogy.

But I think that when we have laws that don't protect anyone else, but only interfere with me, that is what we are really talking about here, but we cloud the issue. I say freedom, and everybody else says safety. I say apples, they say oranges. How did this come about? What caused it to happen? I remember a few years ago there was a fellow killed here on Osborne Street bridge. Apparently he was from Selkirk and I remember reading in the paper, at the time, that Howard Pawley said, I was against compulsory helmets, but now I don't know. Now, Mr.

Pawley said that and I guess, you know, when you have the relatives there saying, oh if only he would have been wearing a helmet; as a matter of fact he had a helmet strapped to the carrier on the back of his bike, but when he flew off his bike at a terrific speed he hit into those concrete planters on the divider on the Osborne Street bridge. Now with proper highway engineering, what were those planters even doing there? I looked down Portage Avenue and there they are again, all over the place.

So maybe the fact is, naturally when someone gets killed we want to blame somebody, the fact that perhaps he was speeding, the fact that perhaps nothing would have saved him in this case, that doesn't matter. 217 Another reason, why do we have this? Well, sometime ago I remember reading in the paper that Autopac tried to limit your payment for injuries because someone wasn't wearing the seat belt and they lost the case. They lost the case because Manitoba does not have a compu lsory seat belt law and the judge then said, well, because there is no law, he did not then contribute to his own injuries.

So is it to save that kind of money for Autopac? The third reason. Talking to my cousin, as a matter of fact, who is in the party, he says, well anybody can go to the NDP convention, pay $57, so somebody put up their hand and said, motherhood, and everybody else said apple pie and all of a sudden we have a resolution that we should have seat belts and helmets, but yet the government had no mandate to do this. I phoned up my representative at the time and said, how do you stand on this. He said, we are not taking a position, we're not fighting the election on this. If it comes about come and talk to me.

I have, I did, he says, well, that's the party, I mean that's the way the party wants to go. But what kind of tyranny of the minority is this? I mean, if 95 percent, heck, if 55 percent of the motorcyclists, not people who are unconcerned by it, and whether or not I'm going to go into the hospital and someone's going to have to pay for me.

I'll gladly pay an extra Autopac premium or, better still, if you're so convinced this is going to save costs, give the people who want to sign an affidavit saying they will always operate their motorcycle with a helmet on, give them a rebate and let us people have our free choice; we'll pay for it. I'll pay for it, I'll pay $25 or $50 extra on my Autopac. There's other ways of doing this besides making it compulsor y. In the public schools, in our brief of 1965, if you look there, we suggested that if driver education becomes available in the public school system motorcycles should be included in that.

Are they even mentioned? I don't think so. Are the benefits of a helmet pointed out to these children when they're at an impressionable age? I don't think so. When we talk about licensing a person to drive, that's what we do, we license them to drive. Where is the skill involved? Oh well, they can learn as they go out and get experience. Hopefully they make the right decision the first time because that may be the only chance they have to learn. Why should it be any easier to get a driver's licence than to get a private pilot's licence?

In Germany, it costs- this is now back in 1976 when I was there, or '7 4 - I think the average cost was around $600 to take the course to get a licence. They don't have any speed limits on their Autobahns. Granted they have high accident rates and they have a high traffic density and they have a lot of other things, but to get a licence there you better know how to drive a car, or else you're going to fail the test. I think you're allowed three chances and then that's it, you don't get anymore. We wouldn't expect that everyone could be a pilot. Why should we expect that everyone should be able to drive a car?

I don't know. I guess I could go on and on like this but, basically, I see this as a question of my freedom of responsibility, not freedom as a licence to do as I wish, but as a freedom to be responsible for myself. I pay taxes; I'm fully employed. I'm expected to pay city taxes, property taxes, provincial taxes,

Thursday, 28 July, 1983 federal taxes; I'm expected to be at work on time; I'm expected to do many other things; I'm expected to drive responsibly on the road. I'm 40 years old but yet I need the government to be my parent. Oh yes, we're protecting the young people. Well it seems that the people who are getting hurt and killed are in their 20s, they're old enough to vote, they're old enough to hold a job, they're old enough to pay taxes. These people, I think, should be given the responsibility to look after themselves in an educated way. Some encouragement could be made for using these helmets. What happens now?

If I go buy a helmet I have to pay a safety tax. Right now I'm wearing cowboy boots which happen to have steel toes on them, they're safer, I think, for a motorcycle. I didn't pay any sales tax on them. Leather jacket - I bought one back in 1963, I've still got it, I still use it. it's lasted that long, it cost me $25.00; that same jacket now would cost over $250.00. Leather pants- you're looking at $250.00. Gloves - you know what a pair of gloves cost nowadays, $30-$35.00. All these things are taxable but they're safety.

People say to me, well, if you knew you were going to be in an accident, what would you rather have on, a helmet or not have a helmet? I say, that's fine, but a helmet and a pair of cutoffs - like I see a lot of these young fellows riding around on - or my boots, my leather pants, my leather jacket, my gloves and no helmet, I'll go with my leathers every time. I think I would be safer and I think I would be hurt less because I can always do things to protect myself. There's way I can roll; ways I can fall. If necessary, I can put my arms around my head to protect that if that's going to be the danger area.

A helmet sometimes, I think, tends to draw the head down to the ground. I mean, here you've got this thing sticking out so a guy falls off at 20 miles an hour or at 50 miles an hour, whatever the case is, gets a bunch of scratches on it and says, look, it saved my life. Without that helmet he may never have even touched the ground. Meanwhile, that helmet is only good for the first bounce because, for that helmet to be effective, it has to have a non-resilient liner. In other words, it has to have a styrofoam or something like that which is not going to rebound, it's going to crush and take up the G-forces.

Once it is crushed it is no good. Some of the force can be dissipated when the helmet shatters; also, in Suffolk County, in an 18-month period they had six deaths directly attributive to the helmet because, when it shattered, it cut the people's jugular vein or stabbed them in the temple, things like this. So now if you can't gua rantee that helmet won't hurt me, never mind whether or not it will save my life, if that helmet can kill me are you, in fact, murdering me? Are you taking away my life?

With all good intention, I honestly think that the government this time, and in all the times past, is honestly trying to do the thing that would be benevolent, the thing that would really try and solve the problem of motorcycle injuries. I don't really think this will solve the problem of motorcycle injuries. As a matter of fact, I think we've got a darn good record.

When you figure that there are 17, 000 registered motorcycles, 31,000 registered drivers and, you know, when I was up here in 1965, my memory, like the four gentlemen in the senior citizen home, my memory 218 sometimes goes a little bit, but we were suffering roughly one death per thousand. There was about 1,2 00 registered motorcyclists; we were having one death a year or no deaths, next year we'd have two, sort of thing, so it was averaging out to about one death per 1, 000. We're way below that right now. Actually, with the things that have been instituted, I think we're doing pretty good.

Naturally we'd like to get it to zero, but what about this helmet when I drop it. lt's no good. That thing could be permanently damaged, that helmet that cost anywhere from $69.95 to $325 for one helmet. Figure it out, if I've got myself and wife, or whatever the case is, that's times two. Helmets are not necessarily interchangeable, not only for health reasons, but because of fit; if they don't fit properly they're not any good to you. So now we're imposing this hardship upon people that they have to, not only buy it, but Autopac doesn't cover it.

If I'm in an accident with it and it's the other driver's fault, then I can sue him just the same as if he ripped my jacket; but if I fall down on a corner because there happens to be a bit of gravel there in the springtime, what happens is, I better not have another accident for another year because it's my fault because I wasn't in control, I should have known that gravel was there. If that helmet's been rapped or banged they're not going to replace it; I have to pay sales tax on it when I buy it. If my jacket's been ripped, I've got t

Document details

Collection	Manitoba — Debates (Hansard)
Citation	32-2-sro8
Type	hansard
Volume / chapter	32nd 2nd hansardpdf sro8.pdf
Language	en
Format	pdf
Source	PROVINCIAL
Identifier	07485ff0987b59c329a9ab8da24b2e838b14fefa

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