Two young girls, abandoned in the wee hours of the night by a heartless bus company in the middle of nowhere near a highway where women go missing and are murdered all the time.
That's what provincial transportation minister Todd Stone would have everyone believe happened after a 16-year-old girl and her 12-year-old sister were stranded at the Valemount Greyhound depot last weekend.
"I have got to tell you, as someone with three young daughters of my own, I just cannot imagine finding out that my children were left on the side of the road in the middle of the night because of an invalid ticket. We're going to get to the bottom of this," he was quoted in the Globe and Mail telling reporters.
"No reasonable individual would leave two children in a potentially unsafe location on the side of the road.
"There are very specific provisions in the Passenger Transportation Act that say clearly a carrier cannot leave individuals, particularly children, in unsafe locations."
Except the bottom of this story doesn't match the tawdry tale the minister was telling in reaction to a story first told by CBC Radio reporters in Prince George.
The invalid ticket part is right and that does fall on either the driver from Prince George to Valemount who let them on his bus or on Greyhound dispatchers that the driver would have consulted about whether he should have let the girls on the bus with expired tickets. Some blame must also fall on the Prince George mother putting her two children on an overnight Greyhound bus without proper tickets to reach their destination.
Yet the invalid tickets is a bit of a sideshow, since the rest of Stone's comments don't line up with the facts on the ground in Valemount.
The girls were not left on the side of the road. Even if everything had gone perfectly, the girls would have been in Valemount for at least half an hour - from 3:45 a.m. until 4:15 - waiting to transfer onto a bus heading to Edmonton. Because the bus to Edmonton that they were supposed to be on was already full with passengers with valid tickets, their next option would have been to wait until the 6:30 a.m. bus went to Kamloops and then transfer from there to a bus heading to Calgary.
Regardless, the girls would certainly have not been alone.
The Valemount Greyhound depot is attached to a 24-hour Petro Canada gas station and convenience store that has two overnight staff. Two Greyhound drivers, including the driver that brought them from Prince George, would also have been nearby.
The Prince George driver does the return trip starting at 6:30 a.m., as does a driver with a bus from Kamloops.
Other adults would also be nearby.
The A&W opens at 6 a.m., so there are staff on site by 5:30, putting the coffee on and firing up the grills.
Stone referred to the situation twice as unsafe yet there is no indication that the girls were in danger at any time.
He also referred to them as children but that's not true, either.
Under transportation policy approved by government, a 16-year-old travelling on a commercial carrier is not an underaged passenger, a detail Stone neglected to mention.
In the case of Greyhound, their policy allows children 15 and up to travel alone without any accompaniment or special documentation (it's even lower - 12 and up - for airlines).
Children between the ages of eight and 15 travelling alone by Greyhound must travel with paperwork (an Unaccompanied Child Form) filled out, detailing who is dropping them off and who is picking them up.
The trips are daytime trips only, no longer than five hours and no transfers are allowed. At age 15, a Greyhound passenger is also able to chaperone a child of any age, so a 16-year-old travelling with a 12-year-old overnight on a cross-province trip that involved transfers was completely acceptable.
Furthermore, Greyhound was not required to supervise these girls, whether they had valid tickets or not.
So why the fuss from Minister Stone?
In a week where the B.C. Liberals are being scrutinized for their party fundraising activities, Stone took the gift of a juicy CBC Radio story and ran with it, happy to stand in front of legislative reporters in Victoria and show how hard he's working to keep B.C. kids safe.
That's politics at its most cynical but that's the way the game is played.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
