June 21, 2008 | In Politics |
Blogger and activist, Ezra Levant, does a great job of summarizing the Liberal Party of Canada’s proposed carbon emissions tax: “Vote Liberal: Painful new taxes, to change your behaviour.”
The Liberals understand that “environmentalism” is all the rage in Canada these days, and are trying to maximize their electoral fortunes. That’s why they’re proposing a painful new tax on carbon emissions that will cause us to “change our behaviour” when it comes to oil and gas products.
We get to freeze in winter, swelter in summer, and ride around on bicycles all year round. But don’t worry, it’s all for the environment. If we don’t feel the pain now, we’ll feel even more later. And the (nanny) state knows best… Right?
I wonder how well this reconciles with the Liberals’ new proposal to ban spanking as a means of parental discipline…
The Liberal-dominated Senate has voted to introduce legislation that would eliminate Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which states that parents and caretakers are “justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child (aged 2 to 12) … if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circumstances.”
In other words, they want to define the reasonable discipline of children as criminal assault.
This legislation, together with a recent court decision overturning the grounding of a 12-year-old girl in Quebec, demonstrates that government is eager to get in on the discipline business… against parents that is. In short, responsible adults are being prohibited from making reasonable decisions regarding the discipline of their own children. The natural family is being eroded in favour of nanny state standardization.
So the government gets to impose whatever painful punishments it feels like, so as to change our behaviour. But when responsible parents want to change their children’s behavior, they go to jail.
Nice logic, Stéphane Dion.
As you have sagaciously noted, the state is in the process of making itself “in loco parentis” for all of us, adults and children.
The pace of this creeping totalitarianism is picking up. Every governmental decision now erodes individual rights instead of strengthening them. Our left leaning courts are part of this overall process, with the odd hiccup when some judge somewhere dimly remembers that the state is not supposed to remove rights from individuals such as raising their own child.
The will of mediocre politicians and bureaucrats is being substituted for our own, but it would not matter if the government were of the best and brightest. It would still be wrong for them to substitute their judgment for our own.
Given their record of mismanagement on any file you care to mention, (a health care system that rations access through waiting lists, cod fished into oblivion, Natives degraded by handouts without accountability, a gun registry that threw billions into the ditch instead of addressing criminals and their illegal gun supply, corporate welfare which works just as badly as social welfare etc.) the hubris of those who govern, that seems to infect even nominally conservative governments is astounding.
With a record as bad as this, any decent person would be working to decrease the size of government and its intrusions into citizens’ lives. Dr. Keith Martin is a good example of someone who has not become a pod person, who filed a motion to defend free speech and intends not to run again in the next election because he says it is impossible to get anything constructive done in our arthritic system.
Comment by kivi — June 21, 2008 #