Another child had drowned in a backyard swimming pool in Quebec, and a spokesman for the Quebec branch of the Lifesaving Society said Thursday it's time more people either fenced off their pools or got rid of them.

A four-year-old boy from Saint-Faustin, in the Laurentians, drowned in his family's pool Wednesday afternoon.

Police say Maxime Filion wandered back to the pool by himself after an earlier swim with the family.

"It's the father who note, around 3:35, that the young boy was missing. He was not inside of the house. So they start to look for him, and they found the boy in the pool. He was with no vital signs," said Manon Gaignard, a spokeswoman for the Quebec provincial police.

CPR was performed on the boy, but he was later pronounced dead at the hospital.

Provincial police are investigating.

Needed: a fence and a self-locking gate 

"Every year, the stats say the same thing. The kids have access to the pool," said David Barrett, a public affairs and marketing co-ordinator for the Lifesaving Society.

"Between 1998 and 2002, there's 22 kids between zero and 14 that died in residential pools in Quebec," Barrett said.

"And I think about 19 of them were between zero and four."

The big problem is that the pools are not secure enough, he said. They need a fence around them and a self-locking gate.

On July 2, a two-year-old girl fell into a backyard pool in Laval and died in a Montreal hospital three days later.

The child's mother and aunt briefly lost track of the girl, authorities reported. She was found floating in the in-ground pool and was unconscious when she was pulled out of the water.

In May, a four-year-old boy died after he was found floating in a backyard pool near Joliette. This case had some safety experts concerned about the kind of pool he drowned in.

The family had just purchased the new pool, a popular inflatable type, which is less than a metre deep and three metres across. It's considered a cheap alternative to conventional above-ground pools.

But Edith Lemay, of the Quebec Red Cross, said the pools have caused a problem.

"People don't think that they're dangerous, because you can buy it pretty cheap, it's really easy to set up, and they don't think you need to fence it off."

Lemay says any pool that can't be emptied easily should be surrounded by a fence with a self-locking gate.

Coroner calls for stronger rules

In early June, a Quebec coroner said there should be tighter regulations on swimming pools.

René Charest had been investigating the circumstances around the drowning death of a teenage girl in the summer of 2005.

Charest made two recommendations:

• All pools and spas should be equipped with a screen over the water-intake filter.
• The province's public health institute should study pool safety.

"[A commission should] study all the security around the pools — private and public — and to make some recommendations, and to get these recommendations all around … Quebec," Charest said when he released his report.
 
Pool safety rules fall under municipal jurisdiction.

Barrett said some municipalities, such as Laval and Quebec City, have strictly enforced rules.

In others, he said, even if they have rules they are not enforced.