First responders can’t carry the burden alone

“I can’t stress the importance of debriefs enough. Having that safe space to share with people who know what you went through is very, very important. You can’t just assume that everybody’s doing good, even if they tell you that they are.”

— Grady Stephenson, former deputy chief of Carberry and Cypress-Langford Fire Department

Three years ago this week, communities in western Manitoba were left in shock after a collision between a semi-truck and a minibus at the intersection of Highway 5 and the Trans-Canada Highway took the lives of 17 seniors from Dauphin.

And unfortunately, it’s no exaggeration to say that the effects of that horrific situation are still being felt — not only by the families who lost loved ones that day, but also by the police officers, firefighters and paramedics who responded to the incident and have had to live with the resulting trauma ever since.

Some of them are having a difficult time doing so.

On Monday, the Sun reported that a former CN police officer, Joram Jardine, was fined $1,400 and handed a three-month driving prohibition after he was caught “two-hand-texting” while driving on duty.

Footage from a body camera he was wearing that day showed him driving with a cellphone in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Prosecutor Ryan Amy told court that the officer had no hands on the wheel for approximately 11 minutes and 56 seconds as the vehicle was in motion.

Jardine had one prior conviction from 2019 for driving over 0.08 and received a $1,500 fine and one year of probation.

Though Amy said this was “at the low end of dangerous driving,” there are aggravating factors, including that Jardine was a CN Police Service officer and driving in a marked police vehicle.

“Put bluntly, he should have known better,” Amy said. “This could have gone very bad, very quickly, for not just Mr. Jardine, but anyone else who was on the roadway that morning.”

Jardine, who was trained as an officer with the RCMP in 2006, served at the Thompson detachment for more than four years and then the Brandon RCMP detachment until 2014. Since 2014, he had been working as a police officer for CN Rail. Being based out of Brandon, he frequently helped out RCMP and the Brandon Police Service with calls.

Court was also told that Jardine had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2019, which was directly related to his policing duties.

But the situation was made worse by what Jardine witnessed as a first responder to the collision just north of Carberry on June 15, 2023.

Readers may remember that in October 2024, more than a year after the incident, Premier Wab Kinew awarded the Order of the Buffalo Hunt to the first responders of the Carberry bus crash “to recognize their bravery and courage.” Jardine was among the 134 first responders inducted into the order following a ceremony at the Manitoba legislature.

Jardine’s defence attorney, Josh Weinstein, said that while it was nice to receive that honour, the ceremony brought back some of the trauma his client experienced “to the forefront.”

The induction ceremony took place three weeks prior to the 2024 offence.

The court heard that Jardine now has a stable home life, and that he is actively seeing a psychologist to help him.

To his credit, Jardine admitted that his driving that day was “abhorrent” and that he didn’t realize the state he was in when he left for work that morning.

“I certainly have not been taking this lightly by any stretch,” he told the judge. “I’ve been to fatalities for many … people driving exactly like I had … It was just probably blind luck that I didn’t cause a collision.”

Of course, past trauma should not excuse anyone from making poor decisions that potentially place members of the public in danger, and the judge was right to impose the sentence that she did.

But Jardine’s story shows how one tragedy can lead to others, and supports the idea that police, firefighters, paramedics and hospital staff are particularly susceptible to trauma from the situations to which they are forced to respond.

The Canadian Institute for Public Safety Research and Treatment says that public service personnel are far more likely than the general public to experience PTSD and suffer from mental-health disorders and depression. Worse still, first responders can also feel stigma from co-workers, organizations or even the public.

It’s for this reason that peer support groups such as the Brandon-based Project Resilience 911 exist. The organization, which connects first responders with peers and clinicians, organized debriefings specifically for those who responded to the Carberry bus crash.

Earlier this year, the organization expanded into northern Manitoba in an attempt to aid emergency workers who face trauma but find themselves far from specialized services.

While organizations like Project Resilience — and other counselling services offered through Manitoba Blue Cross — offer help to emergency services personnel who need it, many emergency crews in rural regions still operate too far from the trauma services they may require.

We ask our first responders to come to the public’s aid when tragedy strikes. They deserve no less consideration.

» Matt Goerzen, editor