Reactions vary to sentence in Broncos crash

Chris Joseph was of two minds Friday.

Joseph, whose son Jaxon was one of 16 people killed in the Humboldt Broncos tragedy April 6, admitted he was “disappointed” with the eight-year prison sentence handed to semi driver Jaskirat Singh Sidhu in a makeshift Melfort courtroom.

But the elder Joseph also was satisfied with the work done by Provincial Court Judge Inez Cardinal leading up to Friday’s sentencing hearing.

“We knew we were going to be disappointed coming in, but we thought Judge Cardinal was very professional, very prepared and I think she came back with the number that was probably the best for all the parties,” Joseph said after the hearing.

“It seems like it’s something that would kind of appease our families yet maybe not be appealable by the defendants … There was no number that would have made me happy. But I do respect the fact that Judge Cardinal did a really thorough job and we were very impressed with how she did that.”

Raelene Herold, whose son Adam was killed in the crash, thought Cardinal appreciated what the families had gone through but was hamstrung by the legal system.

“I know it was a high number of years (that was) precedent-setting in the eyes of the justice system,” she told reporters. “But for killing my son – no.”

Christina Haugan, who lost her husband Darcy — then the Broncos’ head coach — in the crash, tried to keep the sentence in perspective.

“There are no winners here, so we made the conscious decision not to get tied up into numbers,” she said. “I think the court did their job.”

Operating without any real precedent for an incident of this magnitude, Cardinal handed Sidhu eight years concurrent on each of the 16 charges of dangerous driving causing death and five years concurrent on each of the 13 charges of dangerous driving causing bodily harm.

Russell Herold was hoping that Sidhu would have to serve each sentence consecutively.

“When he’s sitting there in jail, he would have thought, ‘Those two years are for maybe Adam Herold. These two years are for Brody Hinz,’ and so on and so on,” Herold said. “Now it’s six months (for each person who died) – and that doesn’t take into (consideration) all those injured people.”

The Crown had proposed a 10-year prison sentence for Sidhu, while the defence was seeking a prison term of between 14 months and 4 1/2 years.

Crown prosecutor Thomas Healey told reporters that Cardinal faced “a particularly difficult decision” because of the lack of a sentencing precedent, but Healey noted the sentence “fits overall” with the Crown’s submission.

“The sentence holds Mr. Sidhu accountable for his criminal actions on April 6,” Healey said. “However, we recognize that there is no sentence that can return any of the victims or their families to where they were before this criminal act took place.

“The Crown trusts that this sentence will send a very strong message to everyone using our highways and that message is that criminal driving will not be tolerated. As we have all seen, when drivers take risks on the road, as was done in this case, the consequences can be catastrophic – and this must stop.”

Mark Dahlgren, whose son Kaleb was one of the 13 survivors on the bus, also hoped the sentence resonated with others.

“Nothing is going to bring anybody back (and) nothing is going to change the injuries that the boys had on that day, so it doesn’t really change anything,” Dahlgren said. “I hope that Mr. Sidhu thinks about what has happened.

“I hope it’s a message to the trucking industry that it’s not OK to wheel those big weights down the highway with disregard for the laws of the road.”

Mark says Kaleb has been focused on school, moving on, "walking the light." #HumboldtBroncos pic.twitter.com/KQSPqFSmqu

— Chris Vandenbreekel (@Vandecision) March 22, 2019

The accident at the intersection of highways 35 and 335 cast a spotlight on the trucking industry in Saskatchewan and in the country as a whole.

The province subsequently announced changes to its training requirements for drivers, which Dahlgren applauds.

“It is a professional job and they should be trained in a professional way,” he said. “Thank goodness that Saskatchewan has taken heed and changed the program and there’ll be 121 hours of training now for truck drivers. Now we need to make sure that that goes nationally.

“There’s many people who are crossing our borders that won’t have the mandatory training and it puts everybody at risk.”

The accident also led to further conversations about seatbelts on inter-city buses, as the Broncos’ bus wasn’t equipped with seatbelts. In the wake of the tragedy, Transport Canada revealed it will make seatbelts mandatory on all highway buses starting Sept. 1, 2020.

That’s just one potential positive coming out of the past year.

“We’ve got a few things still that we need to take care of,” Joseph said. “We’re still fighting for seatbelts, we’re still fighting for driver training, we’re still fighting for road safety. We’ve got a lot of energy still left in us.

“We’re grateful that this part is maybe going to be behind us – we’re hoping – but we’ve still got a lot of worthy causes that we think are going to make the roads safer for everybody and we’ve still got enough energy to keep it going.”

Some of Sidhu’s family members were on hand for Friday’s hearing. Afterwards, Sidhu’s uncle, Dr. Chanan Singh Sidhu, offered his family’s sympathies to the families of the victims.

“We also feel indebted to the families and the Canadian public at large for the support, sympathy and understanding they have shown throughout this trial for my nephew and our families,” he said in a brief statement to reporters.

On April 6, families and friends of the victims, the survivors and their loved ones and many others will mark the first anniversary of the crash. Dahlgren noted that Friday’s hearing was “just one more step in the process.”

“We have an anniversary coming up that’s going to be very, very tough and I hope that, after that, we can maybe get back to whatever our new normal is for everybody,” he said. “It has impacted everyone exponentially and I’m not even sure what our new normal is.”

Joseph said that he and his family would be at the memorial to “honour Jaxon and the Broncos.”

“We can’t think of anyplace else we’d rather be on April 6,” Chris said. “It won’t be a fun event, but it’s one of those things where you just feel like you need to be there.

“That’s where we’re going to be because that’s where we have to be.”

—With files from 650 CKOM’s Chris Vandenbreekel