NIPAWIN — This reporter's travels during a recent week off earlier in May included a day trip up north to Nipawin to dine on some real deal BBQ, but it also included a stop at perhaps the most emotionally charged roadside memorial ever seen on a Canadian highway.
The Humboldt Broncos bus crash from April 6, 2018 shook not just the whole province, but really the entire country after the bus transporting the Broncos junior hockey team was violently struck by a semi at the intersection of Highways 35 and 335 just outside of Nipawin after the truck driver failed to yield at a stop sign. The nightmarish aftermath saw 16 people killed and 13 others injured, prompting what felt like Canada as a whole to react to the tragedy, including setting a national record for online monetary donations through crowdfunding website GoFundMe after the campaign netted over $15 million for the impacted families.
The memorial site today is still a symbol of powerful imagery, with a massive steel cross in the center of a circle of crosses that are decorated with everything from hockey sticks and flowers to assorted trinkets and small notes of remembrance from loved ones.
If anyone should be traveling up in this northeast part of the province in the Melfort and Nipawin area, I highly recommend stopping and checking it out up close and personal. It certainly stays with you in more ways than one.
The semi truck driver who caused the crash, 29-year-old Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, was charged with sixteen counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death and thirteen counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing bodily injury. In early 2019, Sidhu pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to eight years in prison. An immigrant from India, Sidhu planned to appeal deportation from Canada once he was granted parole.
The crash was the deadliest road accident in Canada since the 1997 Les Éboulements bus accident, which killed 44 people.
