The provincial government has been dragging its heels on the Highway of Tears so bad that not only does it seem the Liberals not want to do anything on this file, they don't even want to talk about doing anything.
As The Canadian Press in Monday's Citizen pointed out, it's been 18 months since the inquiry into missing women called for urgent action on the Highway of Tears, specifically the stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert. More than a dozen women have disappeared or were later found murdered on the Highway of Tears or some of the other area highways over the last three decades.
Both First Nations leaders and last year's inquiry recommended a public transit system to help vulnerable people, particularly young women, stop hitchhiking when they need to travel from northern communities. Local governments were going to be consulted and work was supposed to begin on taking real-world measures to keep young women safe on B.C. Interior highways.
Instead, a handful of meetings with a handful of individuals and organizations have happened. Meanwhile, Justice Minister Suzanne Anton says Highway 16 is safer than it used to be and there are plenty of private and public transportation options to keep young women safe on rural and isolated highways in Northern B.C.
Maurine Karagianis, the NDP's critic for women's issues, says "it's a mystery to me why the government hasn't made more progress on this."
Actually, it's not a mystery at all.
The B.C. Liberals don't want to spend money on public transit on Highway 16 because doing so violates so many of their small-c conservative views on public spending and personal responsibility.
The Liberals don't want to come right out and blame the victims but their inaction speaks volumes. Their logic goes like this: everybody should be responsible for their actions and the consequences of those actions. Everybody knows hitchhiking is dangerous. Therefore, people who hitchhike should be responsible for the outcome, whatever that may be.
Never mind that the missing are all women, mostly young and most aboriginal. In this worldview, hitchhiking is like using drugs, buying sex or hanging out with the wrong crowd. It's risky behavior and it could end badly.
So just don't it.
If only life were that simple.
While it often can be for politicians and the well-educated, well-paid bureaucrats who serve them, that's not the way things work outsides of the corridors of power.
Hitchhiking speaks to the very nature of many rural communities and the people who live there. While they are close-knit, no one wants to be a burden and many people would prefer to fix their own problems, whatever the personal risk, than to involve others. Ironically, that do-it-yourself ethic should be respected by the conservative political leaders in Victoria and Ottawa.
Yet the government doesn't leave workers to fend for themselves in workplaces any more. It forces employers to have safety programs in place so, most of the time, workers are safe at their jobs and, most of the time, return home alive.
Increased public transit on Highway 16 is a safety issue and nothing more, yet the Liberals can't help viewing it through their political ideology. In this light, the individual should be responsible for his or her risky behavior and, even if they aren't, what obligation is there - financially, morally or otherwise - for government to take on this role?
Governments have been reluctant to get involved in workplace safety issues in the past because they feel the responsibility falls both to employers and to workers to keep job sites safe. In the case of the Highway of Tears, the provincial government wants municipalities, regional districts and area First Nations to come up with a solution and, most importantly, pay for it. It's a local problem that needs a local solution, they would say, if they were being forthright about it.
They're not wrong about that part. The affected communities do need to be involved.
Victoria, however, has been tasked to lead on this front and that means they should spend less time on coming up with excuses and more effort on getting busy.
