OTTAWA – After affirming the deportation order of Jaskirat Sidhu, the trucker whose distracted driving lead to the Humboldt Disaster, the Immigration and Refugee Board informed him that the severity of his punishment would have been far lessened had he collided with a bus full of basketball players instead of a hockey team.
“This is on you,” explained Mark Pale, of the immigration division, “when you got behind the wheel that day, you should’ve taken a moment to think ‘If I turn away for more than a second I could run the risk of killing someone that the national media might actually care about’. I mean, for God’s sake man, you killed hockey players. For a lot of people in Canada there’s just something more special about them than, say, a basketball team, y’now?”.
He continued, “I’m pretty confident we’d be able to take into account the fact you seem to be a decent, contrite, person, who accepted responsibility for your actions and pleaded guilty in order to spare the victims’ families further grief, if you’d crashed into some hoopsters. They’re harder for most people in this country to identify with, what with their three-pointers, lay-ups and fondness for rap music. Or maybe a soccer team, with their throw-ins, corner-kicks and names-with-rolled-ars. Alas, now we must exact our pound-of-flesh- I mean- justice”.
Meeting chair Stan Mayo further explained the gravity of the disaster. “After these fellows died, the public was inundated with stories about their lives, interviews with their friends and families and, of course coverage of their funerals. Do you think we’d do something like that for the victims of the Montreal mosque attack? Or the London truck attack? That 15-year-old girl never picked up a twig! Well, maybe she did, but she didn’t really look like someone who would”.
Speaking with reporters, board member Kathy White agreed with the sentiments expressed by her colleagues. “There was just so much about those what-the-media-calls-kids-but-were-almost-all-adults that was so quintessentially Canadian. Like how they all dyed their hair blond. Wasn’t that just so ‘hockey’? Of course, when Ray Emery dyed his hair blond the team made him change it, but there was something about him that never really fit in with our vision of the game, y’know?”.
Mayo added “After the loss of so many puck-lives, three years in prison just isn’t enough for looking-too-long-in-the-side-mirror. Granted, Craig MacTavish served a third of that time for choosing to get behind the wheel of a car while plastered, but he PLAYED hockey. Maybe if Mr. Sidhu did too, we could cut him some slack, but he looks more like a cricket player to me”.
In a related story, TSN is encouraging more poorly-trained immigrants to take up trucking, in the hopes of filling ad-space for next season.
