VANCOUVER—The last time Teresa Sankey spoke to her daughter was seven years ago Saturday.

It was a warm evening, with plenty of summer sun left in the sky. Saoirse Sankey called her mom from a payphone at Bob’s Service Centre on Hwy. 17 just east of Sudbury, Ont.

Saoirse was on a “walkabout,” a family tradition seeing children travel the country alone and mostly on foot when they reach the age of 20. She’d already made it from Vancouver to Newfoundland. She was on her way home.

Teresa and Saoirse talked of the future. Saoirse was worried about her grandmother’s failing health and planned to stop in Kelowna to help. She wanted to pick grapes at a commercial vineyard to ease the financial burden on her grandfather.

At 6:41 p.m., she told her mom she loved her and hung up the phone.

At 6:45 p.m., she was hit by a truck.

Saoirse was killed Aug. 31, 2012, while walking along the side of the highway. The moment was captured by the gas station’s security cameras.

“We saw her leaving the service station, walking. As a pedestrian she was walking safely three to four feet away from the fog line,” Teresa said.

“You see a truck hurtling past at one point, and then you just see a cloud of dust.”

On Saturday, Teresa and Saoirse’s sister Freyja planned to return to the spot where Saoirse was killed. They make the pilgrimage from Vancouver to Ontario every year, trying to raise awareness about the dangers of distracted driving and push for harsher penalties when such carelessness causes death.

At the time of her daughter’s death, the punishment for distracted driving in Ontario was far more lenient. That’s changed, but Teresa said that if the crash happened in B.C., even now the driver would get barely a rap on the knuckles.

The driver who killed Saoirse was 18 at the time. According to local media reports, he pleaded guilty to careless driving in Sudbury traffic court and was fined $1,000. He apologized to the Sankey family through his lawyer, Teresa said, but the apology rang as hollow to her as the rest of the process.

It took four days to collect Saoirse’s belongings, Teresa said. Despite the devastation of the crash, somehow her daughter’s mandolin survived intact. A gas station attendant helped collect and safeguard everything for the family, she said.

An autopsy was conducted in Toronto. When it was over, Teresa said, she got to spend only a few minutes with her daughter’s body before it was cremated.

“Nothing prepares you for when that cardboard box lid is lifted, and the body bag is unzipped. And there you see your child, nude as they came into the world, but broken. Cut open. Sewn back together.”

Last September, harsher distracted-driving laws came into effect in Ontario. If convicted, a distracted Ontario driver could face fines of up to $50,000 or as long as two years in jail for killing or seriously injuring someone.

In 2017, when the proposed Ontario laws were announced, B.C.’s public safety minister Mike Farnworth told reporters he was watching closely to see how that province’s legislation worked and what impact it had.

“It’s a pretty significant fine, and that’s why I say we want to look at the legislation in its entirety and see how it works in Ontario. We’ll be looking very closely at their legislation and the impact it has,” Farnworth told News 1130.

Teresa says that’s the same message she got from Farnworth’s office when she reached out to him that year — that B.C. would take a wait-and-see approach.

In March 2018, new regulations came into effect in B.C. that raised the fines for drivers with multiple distracted-driving infractions on their records.

“For example, a driver with two distracted-driving tickets in a three-year period could pay as much as $2,000 — $740 more than under the previous penalty structure,” the minister’s office said in a statement.

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But for now, at least, that appears to be as far as the B.C. government is willing to go.

“We continue to monitor the effects of penalties in B.C. as well as in other jurisdictions, however, at this time there are no plans to change the fine structure that was updated last year,” the statement said.

That’s not good enough, Teresa Sankey says. She wants to see B.C. match Ontario’s penalties. It’s part of why she goes back to the site of her daughter’s death every year.

“We go for two reasons. One, to remember and honour her. When you’re forgotten, that’s when you’re truly dead. Saoirse would want us there, protesting and making people aware of how she died,” Teresa said.

“That’s the second reason why we’re there. I want to see the penalties reflect the gravity of the offence.”

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