Posted by Bill S-228 is winding its way through the Senate which, if made law, would prohibit all food and beverage marketing targeted at Canadians under the age of 12. Essentially, this would require the elimination of all those cute cartoon mascots that virtually every children’s cereal has on the box. My family and I almost never eat breakfast cereal (we don’t like it) so the direct personal impact of this bill is virtually zero. The fact that sugar-coated kids’ breakfast cereal are bereft of any nutritional value whatsoever (we used to joke it was healthier to eat the box than the cereal inside) is irrelevant. I am, of course, firmly against yet another inane law designed to impose the will of some idiot lobbyists and politicians who believe they know what’s best for the rest of us and it is their solemn and holy duty to protect us from ourselves.
It would be nice to blame Toronto stupidity for this but we are rarely global trend setters here in the Great White North. Sadly, our liberals tend to ape whatever their more powerful and famous counterparts in the USA and Europe are doing.
It is always easiest to target children first as it is difficult to argue against protecting innocent and vulnerable children from harm. The problem is that over-reach and mission creep is inevitable. The law of diminishing return applies as equally to non-profit organisations as it does to commercial businesses. The easy and obvious problems are solved first. The question then becomes what do you do next after your immediate goals are achieved? Unlike Caesar crossing the Rubicon, there is no clear and delineated river to show when you have crossed the line. But after decades of liberal nanny state trends; I am pretty certain that on most issues, the low hanging fruit was picked clean a long time ago and we are now entering the realm of idiocracy (great movie, watch it if you can find it – President Comacho has a lot in common with President Trump) and oppression.
Car safety is a great example of this. Mandatory seat belt use is a no-brainer as the data supporting how much safer you are wearing one (they reduce the chance of death or serious injury by about half) is pretty clear. Airbags, on the other hand, are only very modest in their safety benefit and even then only in head on collisions which are a tiny fraction of total accidents. The next logical step when we hit the point of very marginal returns are stupid laws such as the Quebec mandatory snow tire law between 15 December and 15 March. Of course, it never snows like crazy in Montreal before 15 December (viral video of buses sliding down the hill and smashing cars from last week notwithstanding). Nor does is it snow heavily after 15 March when Quebec becomes a tropical paradise. As the old saying goes, you can’t cure stupid nor can you legislate common sense.
Take anti-smoking laws. Banning smoking in hospitals and airplanes was undoubtedly a good idea and generally adhered to even by smokers. Then smoking bans came in on public buildings, restaurants, clubs and bars, first with non-smoking sections followed by complete blanket bans. So far so good but this is where the line starts to get blurry. In California, we have bans on smoking outdoors within 20 feet of any doorway or window of a public building. Given there is almost always a doorway or window within 20 feet, you have to get away from the building completely to smoke. Former California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, got around this law by erecting a huge smoking tent in the yard of the governor’s mansion. I sadly missed the opportunity to smoke a nice (illegal) Cuban cigar with him in this tent while it was still there.
Unfortunately, most of us do not have the time, money or power to be able to find expensive workarounds for oppressive laws. The United States, led by New York City, has now banned smoking even in your own home, albeit only if you live in government public housing. But it doesn’t end there as municipalities across California have been moving to ban smoking in private homes as well.
So let me get the logic straight: it’s OK to have a 25,000 BTU barbecue in your backyard complete with wood-chip smoker but not OK to have a cigarette? How do most people who want to legalize marijuana rationalize the fact that they are also the same ones who are against smoking? For me it is clear that the “reasonable” line has been crossed a long time ago and it’s time for the rest of us, even if we don’t smoke, to stop pandering to iconoclasts whose continued agenda of repressive nanny state rules and laws only erodes freedom for all of us in the long-term. Because it is not just about seat-belts or smoking; it’s about all the busy body, know-it-all, holier-than-thou, fascists that are taking away our liberties one cigarette butt at a time. Former New York Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t content with banning smoking and trans fats, he had to go after soda pop as well.
When a social worker tells me that the police are abusing the system by using them instead of a hard-to-obtain warrant for a drug bust if they find there is a child in the house – it tells me that the draconian and extra-judicial powers we are giving some government institutions are also well across the line of being reasonable. Who can argue against protecting children? I can. Especially when it starts becoming a question of the state versus the parents and especially when the government starts to act without any semblance of rational and reasonable thought: Like this case in Winnipeg where Child and Family Services spent time and money to investigate a mother who let her children play “unsupervised” in their own fence enclosed backyard while she prepared dinner. The poor mother is terrified of the CFS and fearful that they will take her children away. Not surprising since they act like jack-boot Gestapo agents in her own home accusing her of all sorts of misdeeds and making all sorts of threats.
Despite all of our technology and the knowledge and wisdom of all of past humanity at our fingertips, we seem incapable of understanding basic principles of freedom and liberty that our low-tech ancestors elucidated on and understood so well in the not so distant past. On this point, I leave you the following thoughts and quotes on freedom and government intervention from a bygone era:
“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” – John Stuart Mills
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometime sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – C.S. Lewis
Update (24 February 2017): “She was made miserable by curry odors that seeped into her unit from a neighbouring one, exacerbating her allergies. ‘We could not use one of our bathrooms and our clothes dryer held the smell from the ventilation.'” If you had made this comment about your South Asian neighbours in Ontario, you probably would have been branded a racist and driven out of town by the liberal thought police. However, the quote is actually fake as I replaced the word “cigarette smoke” with “curry odors”. “False equivalency!” screams the liberal anti-smoking activist. Actually, no. It’s completely equivalent because despite a sad attempt to add some bullshit about exacerbating allergies, I don’t think there really is a health issue here; just someone inconvenienced and annoyed by their neighbours habits. But it’s smoking, and smokers have a special place in hell according to the radical anti-smoking lobby; a 10th circle of the Inferno that Dante never wrote about. That is why the latest Health Canada report proposes that the government ban smoking on college campuses or inside condo and apartment buildings. As I’ve said before, the line in the sand is well crossed when the government starts legislating what we can or cannot do in our own homes. But that doesn’t bother fascist anti-smoking lobbyist who fail to see anything but their myopic fundamentalist views; after all, they’re doing it for your own good.