In the early hours of May 16, 2004, Margaret Miller got the call that every parent dreads.
“It was three o’clock in the morning, and the phone rings,” Miller recalled yesterday. “Nothing good ever happens at three o’clock in the morning.”
Her son, Bruce — a police officer in Springhill, Nova Scotia — had been involved in a head-on crash in P.E.I.
At the hospital, a doctor told Miller and her husband that there was a 99.5 per cent chance that their son was brain dead.
The person who caused the crash had a blood alcohol level over three times the legal limit and had allegedly been driving 178 kilometres an hour, Miller said. He did not survive the crash.
“When we talk about impaired driving crashes, we often talk in numbers and statistics,” Miller — now the national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving Canada — said at the second annual National Day of Remembrance for Road Crash Victims ceremony at Algonquin College.
“It’s so easy to rattle off numbers.
“I want to tell everyone what it means when 3,000 Canadians are killed and another 200,000 are injured every year in road crashes … It means that parents, children, siblings, grandparents, friends and people that are loved are being lost or injured in crashes.”
“Today is a day to honour the victims and to support their families,” said Transport Minister John Baird. “None of us can turn back time but we can work together to reduce the number of collisions on our roads each and every year.”
