'Exponential rise': Canadian pediatricians document severe e-scooter injuries, deaths in children, teens

As e-scooters become increasingly common across Canada, pediatricians, emergency physicians and other experts warn that injuries — often severe and involving younger people — are rising, while regulations struggle to keep pace.

Dr. Daniel Rosenfield, a pediatric emergency physician at SickKids hospital in Toronto and chair of the injury prevention committee for the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS), says he has seen "a complete exponential rise" in every type of injury that can result from an e-scooter crash — from minor scrapes to major brain injuries and death.

Bad injuries used to be "once in a blue moon," he told CBC News. Now, "anytime we get a call from EMS that says, 'E-scooter trauma inbound,' we're prepared for severe injuries," he said.

E-scooter injury cases at SickKids rose from 26 in 2023 to 46 in 2024 and 107 in 2025, Rosenfield said.

The experience is mirrored across Canada and around the world. A CPS survey of Canadian pediatric specialists, conducted from late 2025 to early 2026 and published Thursday , documented 10 deaths, 12 ICU admissions and 26 hospitalizations lasting more than two days over the previous 12 months as a result of e-scooter crashes. Head injuries were present in about half the cases.

The most severe injuries tended to involve boys between 10 and 15 years old, he said.

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The CPS survey records the experience of pediatric specialists rather than providing a rigorous quantitative analysis. But a separate study published Tuesday in the Emergency Medicine Journal provides multi-year hospital administrative data from three U.K. hospitals that closely aligns with what Canadian pediatricians are seeing.

That study found e-scooter cases at hospitals in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield rose from fewer than 10 in 2019 to almost 150 in 2024. Head injuries were among the most severe, and fewer than two per cent of those injured were wearing helmets.

That U.K. data mirrors what Canadian families are experiencing firsthand.

Just over a year ago in London, Ont., Crystal Dunkley's son Shaun was not wearing a helmet when he took a family friend's e-scooter out for a ride one evening, as he had done many times before.

That evening, Shaun, then 12, hit a raccoon as it ran across his path.

"He believes he was going 69 kilometres an hour when this happened," Crystal Dunkley recalled in a video interview Wednesday.