Saskatchewan residents have been given a new call to action. Last Friday, WorkSafe Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Advanced Education, Employment and Labour and Safe Saskatchewan hosted a media conference announcing the launch of a more holistic injury prevention movement Mission Zero: Live injury free.

This new mission will build on WorkSafe Saskatchewan's recognized Mission: Zero campaign in the workplace. Mission: Zero Live injury-free aims to move the message from the workplace to the community and to people's homes.

Here was my acceptance speech for the new Mission: Zero concept on behalf of Safe Saskatchewan.

My name is Gord Moker, Chief Executive Officer of Safe Saskatchewan. On behalf of Safe Saskatchewan, our Founding, our Endorsing, and our other injury prevention partners it is with great pleasure that I accept this Mission: Zero quest on behalf of the people of the province and thank you to WorkSafe Saskatchewan.

Every hour of every day, 18 people are injured in our great province. By the end of today there will be 435 people who will have had and injury. Twenty-six of those people will end up in the hospital, 10 people will suffer permanent disabilities and 1 person will die from their injuries. In addition to the human costs of pain and suffering, preventable injuries cost our province $1 billion every year.

Preventable injuries have a negative impact on people, on families, on communities, on industry in Saskatchewan and our entire society. We need to turn around that picture so that the quality of life of our people, and the ability to realize the full potential of our province can come to reality.
Our mission is an injury-free Saskatchewan, where safe lifestyles influence how we live, work and play. Our mission now in partnership with WorkSafe Saskatchewan, and you the people of Saskatchewan is to eliminate unintentional injuries altogether. Let's work together on our mission of no injuries. And let's not stop until there are no injuries, no fatalities, no people being hurt, no families or communities being impacted by the negative effects of preventable injuries.

We've had enough - of the pain and suffering, and the costs of our economy - our partners have had enough. And now we need your help to put an end to this pain and suffering.

Thank you to Saskatoon Family Expo, one of our Endorsing Partners in Safe Saskatchewan, for providing us with the ability to be here this morning and through the weekend as we help to educate our children as to another way of life in terms of how we need to look at injuries. It's so important that we make our children injury-aware so that they can help us as parents and grandparents. And furthermore, we have an obligation as parents and grandparents, and that's to provide a good example when it comes to injury prevention, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You know if we don't wear our bike helmets when we're out biking with our families, if we don't buckle up when we're on the roads, why should our children?

We need to provide as good an example as we can.

We need to change attitudes in Saskatchewan.

We need to change behaviours in Saskatchewan.

We need to change.

Let's all adopt Mission: Zero as our own mission, our own quest to put an end to our provincial unintentional injury epidemic and let's live injury-free.