Eugene Nippard wants our provincial government to do the same. He says Newfoundland and Labrador is a ‘have’ province, and some of our oil money should be invested in this safety feature.
While fencing might seem like a great idea, there is a big difference between our province’s two- and three-lane Trans-Canada Highway and New Brunswick’s controlled access divided highways.
Controlled access highways have their name for a reason. You get on or off at the assigned exits, and putting a camp or driveway off the highway is strictly forbidden.
That is not the case here in Newfoundland. Take a drive from Port aux Basques to South Branch and you will pass hundreds of driveways, ATV paths, woods roads and pull-off parking spots used by local residents to access the great outdoors. In many cases, driveways to people’s primary residence exit directly into highway traffic.
Of course it doesn’t stop in South Branch. There are thousands of homes and cabins between Port aux Basques and St. John’s accessed from the side of the highway.
There may be the odd stretch of highway in this province where moose fencing is a viable option: perhaps in Terra Nova National Park or some of the more remote stretches of the highway between Deer Lake and Grand Falls-Windsor. However, those viable sections of highway are few and far between.
There are thousands more kilometres of side roads where moose-vehicle accidents also take place, and where land and cabin owners also access their properties. Choosing which roads should or should not be fenced would be an exercise in futility for the provincial government. For every citizen demanding fencing on his or her road, there would be another protesting the fence.
Mr. Nippard is promising a march on the provincial legislature if some action is not taken on this matter soon.
Fencing may seem like a great idea on paper, but the reality will bother more people than moose-vehicle accidents. There are solutions to the problem of moose-vehilce accidents, but fencing on a large scale is not one of them.
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