The official opposition at Montreal city hall is calling on the Plante administration to require its suppliers to have sideguards on all their trucks as of this January.
"We know that these things can work and I think the time is right because we have a political consensus," said St. Laurent mayor Alan DeSousa.
"I think we want to make sure there are no further deaths."
St. Laurent was the first borough to equip its trucks with sideguards after the death of Jessica Holman-Price who was struck and killed by a snowplow in 2005 while walking in Westmount.
DeSousa said there have been 21 fatal road accidents so far - four of them involving heavy trucks.
In January 2017 when she was leader of the opposition, Montreal mayor Valérie Plante first suggested putting sideguards on trucks that do business with the city.
The Coderre administration made a recommendation to that effect.
But then it hit a dead end earlier this year when Jean-François Parenteau in charge of citizen services said it may be hard to impose such a condition on suppliers when they are already in demand and in short supply.
"That is blatantly not true. This is something the city has test run on its own fleets, we found that there are no cost impediments to it. In fact, it comes in costing much less and much quicker to install sideguards in our own trucks than it had been forecasted," said DeSousa in an interview with CJAD 800.
DeSousa will table a motion at tomorrow's council meeting calling for suppliers' trucks - including those that do snow removal and construction - be outfitted with sideguards as of this January 1.
The Plante administration has said it would like to see a province-wide regulation.