ADULT: What are you gonna do ARREST me?

Laws? LAWS!!!
We don't NEED no STINKING LAWS!

Until recently, it had never been quite clear why it was necessary that Canada should lead the world in the creation of obtuse, interfering, illogical and just plain malevolent regulations with which to harass its citizens. Now, thanks to Liberal MP Paul Zed, we have our answer. It is to give politicians something to do! Rebuking critics of that much-loved Parliament Hill ritual: the annual back bench threat to set legal limits on our credit card interest rates — Zed snapped: "we are legislators. What we do every day of the week is legislate."

That's a lot of time to fill!!!

This is a little closer to the truth than the excuse offered the last time a Liberal MP sallied forth in defence of the nation's oppressed shopaholics. Testifying before the Commons Industry Committee, MP Paul DeVilliers urged support for his private member's bill capping credit card rates on the grounds, as it was reported in a press account, that legislators have a duty to protect society, just as they are obliged to make seat belts and other safety measures necessary. Consumers, it seems, cannot be expected to "shop around" for low-cost card issuers — many of whom offer no-frills, low-rate versions. Better yet, consumers could refrain from running up debt or carrying a balance!
Isn't it obvious? People need protection from themselves!

The seat-belt defence - "if we can legislate the use of seat belts, surely we can..." has become a staple among advocates for fresh intrusions on personal liberty, which rather validates the concerns of those who saw this bit of smothering state concern for our well-being as the thin end of the nanny.

It is frequently invoked by proponents of legislation, in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, making it illegal to ride a bicycle without a helmet.

More recently, the battle has expanded to other areas the health police - as represented in the militant wing of the anti-smoking league. Not content with banning smoking in all public places, in shops and restaurants and even bars, the campaign is now shifting into the private realm.

The Ontario Medical Association has issued a report suggesting it might be time for a legal prohibition on smoking in houses with pregnant women or young children. Old dad, contentedly smoking a pipe by the fire? According to the association, he's a child abuser. "Parental tobacco use in the home," says the report, "is a form of physical abuse." The association concedes the notion of sending the police sniffling through people's houses might be controversial. "But as with other laws, it brightens, state control of home life will, like the use of seat-belts in cars, become the accepted norm." Just possession of demon weed will soon be enough to invite that midnight knock upon your door.

Give me liberty or BITE ME!
The demonization of obesity moved up a rung on the scale of social ills with the announcement that overweight Canadians now cost the health care system as least two billion dollars per year — and perhaps as much as four billion! This is in the same range as the claimed "societal cost" of smoking. Given that home invasions, the extinguishing of property rights and criminalization thousands and thousands is being justified by the potential "lives saved" — or is it lengthened — under the anti-gun law — where about eighty Canadian deaths occur each year from firearms, (most from hunting accidents and suicide) — it’s obvious the government should be shifting to a MAXIMUM Gestapo mode to monitor all those Canadian bathroom scales, tax french fries, bacon & roast beef.

Based on the Gun Control logic, winter coats and gloves should also be regulated and licenced since on average over eighty Canadians die every winter from hypothermia. (Then, it's estimated failure by hospital workers to properly wash their hands kills 25 times that many Canadians and medication mistakes kill ONE HUNDRED TIMES that many people in — 2,200 and 9,800/year respectively, and isn't medical care one of the most heavily regulated, licenced and controlled fields?)

The fascination with the eradication of all life-shortening or perceived high-risk behavior marches forward.

To preserve our rich cultural heritage from the evils of American domination, the federal government has published a helpful brochure, informing those Canadians who subscribe to American satellite services that they are liable to criminal prosecution.

The RCMP will have a busy time of it given the number of illegal satellite dishes in use was last estimated to exceed a quarter of a million — the product of a decade of federal regulation politics that succeeded for many, many years in preventing any competing Canadian service from getting off the ground.

But then, the police may decide to hold off a while, since it hasn't yet been established that watching HBO is a criminal act.

It doesn't matter -- just as it doesn't matter that the statistical likelihood of sustaining a fatal head injury while riding a bicycle is about one in 14,200,000 cyclist/kilometres (calculations available on request), nor that the health risk from second-hand smoke is in most ordinary circumstances negligible. (Statistically, it is actually out-ranked by peanut butter in terms of health risk factors.)

The satisfaction that so many Canadians derive from telling others what to do is wholly unrelated either to the necessity of the intervention or the chances of its success. It is a pleasure in itself.

It's REGULOMANIA!

Power Boat Operator Permits, Bill C-68 — idiotic, expensive, unworkable and divisive Gun Control laws…

Another facility-challenged parliamentary committee issued a report recommending that the Federal Government make the completion of a twelve week "pre-separation" training course a mandatory requirement before a couple can break up.

From the northeast corner of Nova Scotia in Cape Breton, Professor Catherine Carwell has come up with an interesting scheme: the Licence to Breed law with appropriate fees no doubt...
The suggested criteria for the so called Parenting Licence would include a high school diploma, completion of training sessions and the signing of contracts leading to the issuance of provisional licences — which I must assume will set out the technical standards of due diligence required in the role of parent. She doesn't plan to include an old-fashion legal marriage.

One really might wonder what form of punishment might be inflicted on reproductive offenders — given how brutally society already punishes families, but under the proposed model, if conditions of the contract are violated; the state will immediately be empowered to remove the child from the biological parents.

This will save the "considerable delay inherent in the current child protection legislation" and permit the child to be quickly placed with foster parents at an earlier point in its development. Professor Carwell expressed the hope that an incidental bonus of this plan will be a drop in demand for off-shore babes — needed here in Canada to meet the demand for really young child adoptees — and she likewise expects far fewer problem teens to be reared.

There's no projection of what the cost will be to build larger prisons to house all those convicted of parenting without a permit, but I am sure the program could be made self-funding... by levying appropriate reproductive fees — when pigs fly starships at Warp 10.

Likewise when the CRTC declares, as it did a while back that it intends to regulate the Internet to ensure adequate levels of Canadian content, it is quite irrelevant to object that the exercise is a ludicrous waste of time; that it is impossible to regulate the 'Net; or that it is already clogged with Canadian content.

The facts have nothing to do with it. Or as the new chairman of the CRTC, Francoise Bertrand, put it, "One thing I know is, certainly, from the start, to say there is no place, or no role for the CRTC, is certainly not in my mind."

The puritan, it is said, disapproved of bearbaiting, not because of the suffering of the bear, but because of the enjoyment it afforded the spectators.

The desire for regulation has similar origins: not the misdeeds of the regulated, but the pleasure of the regulator.