Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise today to talk about a very important subject that I’m very passionate about as well as the realignment of Highway No. 4, but I’ve always been passionate about first aid and the training that we can ensure others can have.
I’ve got a long history of being a First Aid instructor many years ago in a previous life that I did long before politics, and I can tell you many people have often told me that they wouldn’t know what they would do if they hadn’t had first aid training. You know, I hear things like it’s easy to distinguish the difference between hypothermia and heat stroke certainly by the circumstances in some of the things that you see by the way that they react, but the average person may have trouble identifying what’s the difference between a stroke and a heart attack. So people have often told me that they find it challenging or if not insurmountable to want to help but not know what to do. So it almost paralyzes people.
I think what we have here before us today is an opportunity that if the Department of Education mandated in our schools, in our junior highs, that all our kids learned first aid. It’s been well known and well documented and it is a fact that even bad first aid is better than no first aid. I mean, I put the question out there that what would people do if we were alone on the land, or out waterskiing at Fred Henne, or even just at home by themselves with somebody else who had an incident and they were the only ones there to ask. In panic, what would they do?
We could be a new jurisdiction, one probably leading not just this country but probably even the world on this subject by saying we take this so seriously and our education system demands this, that we get our youth finally trained in first aid and we would continue that.
A lot of people today would tell you that the reason that they don’t take First Aid is quite simple. It comes down to time and money. So let’s take those excuses away, let’s empower our youth and let’s ensure that we can provide good training that could help people. We may be saving the lives of our loved ones, our friends, and by that we would be good stewards of our future.
As I said, no first aid is almost a shame. We could be changing that dynamic today by mandating our schools starting this school year, which would start in September obviously, by a change of this paradigm. We can be leaders, and as I’ve often said, it’s a lot more enjoyable driving the bus than being under it. So let’s get ahead of this problem and show the world that we mean business in training our youth. Thank you very much.
