Winter road maintenance bill voted down at Queen's Park

A private member's bill to improve winter highway maintenance on Highways 11 and 17 has been voted down at Queen's Park.

Muskegowuk-James Bay NDP MPP Guy Bourgouin put forward the bill. He called Bill 125 Making Northern Ontario Highways Safer, 2019 common sense.

Bourgouin wanted to have those highways reclassified so they would have been maintained under the province's strictest requirements for snow removal, making them the same as the 400 series highways and the QEW, where snow must be removed within eight hours of the end of a snowfall.

The motion was debated Thursday afternoon.

"It's very real that the Northern Ontario highways 17 and 11 are the most deadly highways provincially, again we know that the drivers in the region are two times more likely to die in a crash as anywhere else in the province," said Kiiwetinoong NDP MPP Sol Mamakwa, during the debate.

"Northerners deserve to be safe. They deserve to be safe on the highways and we can all appreciate that no one because of where they live should not have the safety of service on those roads," said Etiobicoke-Lakeshore Progressive Conservative MPP Christine Hogarth, who is originally from northern Ontario.

However, after some debate the bill came up short on support to get it to third reading.