Road Safety in Canada – Still a Critical Issue

Road collisions continue to account for more than 90 percent of all transportation-related deaths. We have the know-how to reduce this number substantially; but we need to do more if we are to keep pace with road safety progress in other developed Western countries and make Canada’s roads the safest in the world.

Road safety interventions of the past 30 years have halved the number of road users killed in Canada. However, almost 3,000 people still die in traffic collisions each year.

Road injuries alone drain the health care system of billions of dollars annually.
Certainly, it’s safer to travel on Canadian roads now than it was 30 years ago. Nonetheless, traffic collisions kill almost 3,000 and injure approximately 220,000 road users annually, hospitalizing 18,000 of them.

While these tragedies have decreased by half over a period when the number of vehicles on the roads has doubled, these casualties are costing us heavily. First, road collisions usually kill people in the prime of life. Second, the injuries drain the health care system of billions of dollars annually.

Canada’s unique road safety challenge

Canada is unique among highly developed countries. It is one of the largest countries in the world, with one of the lowest population densities. Consequently, Canadians rely very heavily on motorized vehicles as a basic means of transportation. The public transportation alternatives that exist in many smaller, more densely populated countries simply do not exist in Canada. These factors, combined with extreme climatic conditions and the sharing of road safety among federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions, all add to the challenge of making Canada’s roads the safest in the world.

The international yardstick used to rate countries’ road safety performance is "deaths per registered motor vehicle."

Vision 2001 – We’re moving forward…

Since Vision 2001 was inaugurated in 1996, five percent fewer road users have been killed and eight percent fewer have been injured in traffic crashes. Using the international measure of "deaths per registered motor vehicle," Canada’s road safety has improved over this period by almost nine percent.

In 1998, Canada’s international ranking on road safety was ninth among the world’s 29 OECD member countries.

…but we aren’t yet at the end of the road

Even though the 1998 fatality rate dropped an impressive 6.3 percent over 1997 levels, Canada’s position in the world road safety arena is slipping. For 1998, we have fallen from eighth to ninth among the world’s most developed economies [the 29-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)].

This is the second consecutive year that Canada, despite registering noteworthy improvements over the previous year’s death rate, has lost ground to other nations. Why? Because other countries are implementing even more successful safety initiatives.