Can you guess what call CAA prioritizes over all others?

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Think about all the things a CAA membership covers. Battery boosts, towing when the boost doesn’t work, maybe fuel when you’re stranded. Now consider what their top priority call is. 

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Your child or your pet is locked in a car.

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Can you guess what call CAA prioritizes over all others? Back to video

Together with trouble on the 400-series highways, this takes precedence over any other call that comes into their control tower. 

Safety, says Anita Mueller, the company’s VP of Club and Automotive, is their mantra. We read so many headlines of children or pets accidentally or intentionally left in a locked car, we might forget that much of today’s modern technology has created a gut-wrenching moment where people can discover themselves easily locked out of their own cars — with their child or pet inside. 

“It’s probably surprising to hear how many of these situations happen. Nearly 3,000 in a normal travel-pattern year,” says Mueller, and that’s just CAA in Ontario and Manitoba. Many newer cars reset locks on a timer. You open the rear door to strap in your little one, and your driver’s door might re-lock itself if too much time has passed without that door being opened. If your key fob is in your bag that you’ve already tossed inside the car, your access is blocked. Test out your own car, and spend time sorting this out with a new car or a rental.

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“It’s about trying to calm and reassure someone so we get the experts to the scene as soon as possible,” says Mueller. Tiberio Periera is a Roadside Problem Solver in Winnipeg — that’s his title with CAA. Not all calls involve a tow hook or a flatbed. Often, it’s someone like Periera who will be dispatched. “When you come to someone who has locked their child in their vehicle or even their pet, they’re sometimes inconsolable, so we have to drop everything and get there as quickly as we can. We have the rest of the team relaying information to me, what kind of vehicle, make sure they have enough cell phone battery to continue speaking to them, so when I get there, I’m ready, and it takes a matter of seconds [to open the door] but I have to console them while I do my job, so it can be kind of tricky.”

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Matt Jarick is the Control Tower Manager. Using Gen 2 tech, calls involving children and pets are immediately prioritized and tagged as emergencies by operators who are all trained as 911 operators, and who then receive more, ongoing, extensive training. “The control tower will see that in seconds, and within the next minute, we are making contact with the member.” They have to assess a multitude of things: is the vehicle running, is the A/C or heat on, cell phone capacity, they’ll be given a direct line to the control tower so they can reestablish contact if it’s lost, a real-time count of how far out help is, as well as staying on the phone with them so they remain calm until help arrives. “If our ETA is tight, we might tell them to call 911 as well. We also might dispatch two different vehicles to reach that member, usually from two opposite directions, and it’s usually because of traffic.”

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But what if it’s not your child. What if it’s the dreaded situation in a parking lot where it’s someone else’s kid or dog in a stranger’s car. Can members call CAA?

“You could, you absolutely could. We will get to the scene and figure out how to unlock — if there is a safety aspect — but then of course we also have to figure out how to wait until the police get to the scene. That is a chargeable offence…and not the norm of what we do. But if we heard there’s a child or animal in distress, we would rescue that child.” Police would have to be involved, and the CAA agent would have to stay on scene to ascertain ownership of that car. Mueller is clear when a call like this comes in: If it’s a safety issue, they will dispatch. 

Periera makes a great point. “What a lot of people don’t know is you can help someone else in a parking lot with your membership.” Your membership insures you, not the vehicle. When there is an imminent safety aspect to a situation, you can call for help for another. Someone locks their kid in their car? Call for them. They lock their keys in their car? They can call themselves and take out membership on the spot. The safety aspect is key. 

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“We put safety above all. We put it above memberships. We put it above profit. We put it above all that terminology to be able to rescue somebody when safety is in jeopardy,” says Mueller. If a call like this — involving a stranger’s child or pet — does come into the control tower, the caller will be told they’re dispatching someone, and the caller now has to call 911. 

There’s never a good time to leave your child or your pet in a locked car. Yes, some people leave their car running. Some cars have a “dog-mode”. But animals (and children) can turn off the ignition, or put the vehicle into gear. Periera says he arrived at one call and the dog had opened the window. A plus as a rescue, a minus if the owner had intended on the dog not being able to escape.

Your roadside membership generally covers a lot of things for you. Remember it covers this before you call police or fire rescue.