A focus on water safety could save lives

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/06/2023 (825 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The drowning deaths of newcomers, many of them children and young adults, are a perennial problem on Manitoba’s waterways.

The death of 12-year-old Usaid Habib at Whiteshell Provincial Park late last month is the latest in a string of such tragedies. In May 2018, three-year-old Zane Habash drowned at Nopiming Provincial Park. In July of that year, Pawan Preet Brar, 20, and Arwinder Brar, 19, drowned at Lake of the Woods, Ont.

In 2016, David Medina, 12, and Jhonalyn Javier, 11, recent newcomers from the Philippines, drowned at Grand Beach. Later that month, Jean-Baptiste Ajua, a 22-year-old who had immigrated from Rwanda seven years earlier, drowned at Birds Hill Provincial Park.

Drowning deaths do not just happen in lakes, ponds and rivers. Last year, a six-year-old boy from Nigeria drowned in a swimming pool at a townhouse complex in Winnipeg.

This is not an exhaustive list of lives cut short. All of these deaths made headlines. And all of those headlines renewed calls for more swim lessons and safety training for new immigrants to the province.

After all, drowning deaths are preventable.

A Lifesaving Society of Canada study from 2016 found that newcomers were four times more likely to be unable to swim than those who were born in Canada. New Canadians between the ages of 11 to 14, meanwhile, are five times more likely to not know how to swim than their Canadian-born counterparts — and yet, 93 per cent of respondents in this age group said they spend time in, on and around water.

Which makes sense: spending time in, on and around water is a quintessential Canadian summertime pastime and one of the draws of a new life in this country. But a day at the beach can quickly turn into the worst day of one’s life if one does not have appropriate water-safety or swimming skills.

Unfortunately, there are real barriers that exist when it comes to accessing swimming lessons. The lack of a widely available, all-grades, in-school swimming program is one. For lessons in city pools, hurdles may include language, cost, transportation, a difficult enrolment process, and a lack of available lifeguards and instructors exacerbated by the pandemic.

Reaching new Canadians is a priority identified in the 2022 edition of the Canadian Drowning Prevention Plan, drafted by the Drowning Prevention Research Centre. Its target: to implement survival swimming skills training to all new Canadians within the first three years of their arrival to Canada by 2026 by, in part, providing research to Lifesaving Society branches so that they can secure provincial funding.

Other recommendations include the dissemination of water-safety information at community and welcome centres. Free educational seminars, stressing the safety fundamentals outlined in Manitoba Parks literature — such as not entering bodies of water alone, always supervising children around water, swimming only in designated areas, and knowing one’s swimming limitations — could also be implemented. Learning to recognize drowning and distress on the water is also an important skill, as drowning doesn’t always look like drowning.

Manitoba Parks has worked to ensure that personal flotation devices are more readily accessible via the life-jacket loaner stations that first popped up in provincial parks in 2018 — a program that should be adopted more widely. PFDs should be worn on watercraft, certainly, but should also be worn by non- or inexperienced swimmers. A PFD can’t help you if it’s not actually on you.

Inflatables are not the same as PFDs and should be left at home. Two girls were swept out past the buoy lines on Lake Winnipeg in 2021, and had to be rescued.

But learning to swim is the best way to build confidence and stay safe around water, which is why removing barriers to a lesson for a growing — and disproportionately affected — segment of our population should continue to be a priority for Manitoba.

As Christopher Love from Lifesaving Society Manitoba told the Free Press last year, “one death due to drowning is one too many.”