posted by The Lonely Rider

This is a letter that I sent to Dr. Helena Jaczek, MPP, who recently introduced a Private Members Bill to ban children under the age of 14 from being allowed to ride as passengers on motorcycles.

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Greetings Dr. Helena Jaczek,
I am writing to you to express my disappointment at the Bill 117, Highway Traffic Amendment Act (Child Passengers on Motorcycles).

I am a father of a 9yr old boy. I am 33 years old, and I am a passionate about motorcycling, and I very much look forward to passing on that passion to my son. I also run various websites that cater to the motorcycle enthusiast that promotes safe riding.

My son and I both look forward to spending time on the bike, taking him places and letting him experience the world in a way that cannot be replicated in a car. We look forward to exploring the open road, open skies, and generally speaking the road less traveled.

To me, you see, motorcycling is more than just an economical and environmentally responsible mode of transportation. It's freedom. Freedom to unglue my mind from life in an office, from life in front of a television, and yes - from life behind the glass windscreen of a car, which isolates me from the world around me.

I'm not a leather-clad "biker" that rides solely on sunny weekends to a coffee shop to hang out and rev my engine. Nor will you ever find me blasting through residential communities or riding at excessive speeds on backcountry roads. My passion is for touring and exploring the beauty of riding roads that take me through the countryside, forests and small towns along the way. In short...exploring our world and communities and I love sharing those with my son. Teaching him along the way that there is more to life than TV and video games.

This bill assumes a couple things; firstly, that motorcycles are so dangerous that children must be protected from them and secondly that because of this, parents should not be able to make the choice to ride with their children.

I would like to say, before I go any further, that any child hurt or killed is clearly a tragedy. And with any child hurt or killed on the back of a motorcycle, it's very easy to say, "If they had only not been on the motorcycle, they would have been fine." However, this is absolutely and without question a logical fallacy. Any child killed in a car accident would have been fine had they not been in the car. Any child killed in a skiing accident would have been fine if they had not gone skiing.

You provide statistics to support your Bill, but you don't mention the number of actual child fatalities over the last 10 years...only injuries.

Life is not without risk and nearly every recreational or sporting activity comes with some. It is a parent's responsibility to calculate those risks. Even our day-to-day routines can be dangerous, including taking our children to school could result in them being killed along the way.

The heavy-handed, reactionary legislation of Bill 117 takes away my right as a parent to make decisions about exposing my child to the world I want them to see, in a manner that is unfair, prejudicial and to be frank, discriminatory. It assumes that I am not capable to make decisions about the risks I'm prepared to expose my children to and the rewards associated with those risks.

And it's a slippery slope to saying I can't take my kids skiing or snowboarding, both of which also pose a safety risk to children; or that I can't allow my son to ride a bicycle because that too poses a safety risk. In fact, more people are killed riding bicycles each year than passengers are killed on motorcycles (regardless of age).

Many children regrettably drown in backyard pools, are we to go further with your train of thought and ban backyard pools also? Once we start enacting laws that restrict recreation and sporting activities for kids, where does it end? No more hockey, bicycles, ice-skating, skiing or snow boarding? No more camping trips because a child may trip and break an ankle? No more swimming for fear that they may drown?

Motorcycling seems to be an easy target for those that don't ride and don't care to understand our passion. They see idiots on cruisers wearing leather chaps with their loud pipes pretending to be gang members (who are actually more likely to be lawyers or doctors) or alternately the reckless sportbike riders who slalom in and out of traffic, and assume that these are the images represent all riders in general.

This legislation is inappropriate, sensationalist, one-sided and opportunistic. As a voter, I can promise that it will affect my behaviour at the polling station. This "save the children at any price" nonsense has gone on quite far enough. If you really want to save the children, ban backyard pools in any household where the children don't know how to swim. Ban children from ski slopes or from riding bicycles. Ban them from playing organized sports like hockey. All of which cause many injuries to children each year, even deaths.

Labels: Bill 117, children, motorcycle, MPP Jaczek