I grabbed a Double Down from KFC for lunch Thursday. It was glorious. Fried chicken, cheese and bacon. That’s it.
I decided it was best to get the most manly sandwich on the market before Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty changed his mind again and went back to dreaming up ways to ban it.
In case you missed it, the Ontario government mused about banning the Double Down. Then, before the howls of laughter at that thought had even subsided, they changed their mind and decided to let adults eat whatever junk food they want to.
But why wouldn’t the McGuinty government tell adults what they can and can’t eat? They tell school children what they can eat and tell parents what they can send in school lunches.
My nephew was sent home with a package of unopened cookies once and a _nasty note informing his mother that cookies are not acceptable for lunch — ever. Not even as a treat.
It’s so bad in Ontario that during federal Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s summer tour, I heard senior Liberals complain about McGuinty’s nanny state.
Ontario is not alone in going too far in trying to control the lives of its citizens.
On Thursday the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving Quebec parents who wanted to pull their children from certain classes.
A few years ago, Quebec replaced its old religious education program with a new “Ethics and Religious Cultures” course. It’s mandatory. Your kids will learn it and, even if you choose a private school, the province will shove this down your throat. Just ask the private Loyola High School in Montreal.
In a separate case in Quebec, Premier Jean Charest is trying to use the courts to tell a private Catholic school that they must teach that all religions are equally true. If that’s the case, why would parents pay tuition to send their kids to a private Catholic school, or Jewish school or Muslim school?
It baffles the mind.
Across the country, municipal and provincial governments have banned lawn pesticides that have been ruled safe by federal regulators. Golf courses where the politicians play and make their deals are, of course, exempt from the ban and so putting on the 18th green is not impeded.
Down at the local soccer field, it’s a different story.
If a parent can get their children out of doors and moving to work off all the junk food they aren’t allowed to eat in school, there is a good chance little Johnny or Judy will break an ankle.
Fields for soccer and baseball that once were covered in grass are now so choked with weeds it would take a team of bureaucrats to find the grass.
But at least we’re safe from everything — except politicians.
Having banned junk food and water bottles, trans fats and speech that might offend someone, politicians are forever on the lookout for the next thing they can protect us from.
Well they can have my Double Down when they pry it from my cold dead fingers … or when KFC drops it from the menu.
But the crap we eat today, and the lack of exercise, we’re damn fools to ignore the warning signs, and I swear society as a whole is too dumbed-down to know how to truly eat healthy. How do we propose to change it? Come on, get real, our parents and grandparents did not eat like this. Sure we can live a long time, but sick, unhealthy aged population is eating up health care costs is not where we want to be….
MJ77
You do not get it. You are perfect willing to trade something so valuable as to be absolutely priceless for the sake of whether your fellow citizens eat heathly or not, whether you may get a whiff of second hand smoke or not, whether you may be offended by someone else’s words or not, etc, etc.
The thing you are so willing to give away, the thing your parent’s parents were willing to give their very lives for, the thing that generations have fought for and some still do today, that little thing so precious is called freedom.
You may not think that freedom is at stake in something as simple and as mundane as whether citizens can eat what they please but in principle it is very much so. The state serves the purpose of providing services that are for the common good, policing, defense, etc, and controls the actions of its citizens to the extent that they affect other citizens while promoting collective peace and fairness between us. When we allow the state to dictate our individual behavior, behavior that does not effect anyone else, then we begin to see this as an acceptable function of the state. Once we as citizens allow this then there really are no boundaries anymore. The state’s actions are always taken “for the common good”. Just as McGinty has you convinced that KFC shouldn’t be allowed to sell an unhealthy burger (and just what does KFC sell that is healthy?), Hitler had many Germans convinced that the antisemitic regulations initiated by his government were necessary to their economic health. How long did it take the majority of Germans to realize that their state had gone and was going to go too far with this.
The most the Ontario government should do is to provide information & education to promote healthy eating habits (and possibly removing the provincial portion of HST from healthy food costs). Beyond that we as a society simply have to accept that not all individual citizens will follow this advice.
The health costs associated with unhealthy eating are not a justification for banning junk food any more than it would be to have the state require you to exercise daily, or abort unhealthy fetus’s, or take specific drugs. These health costs exist because we have chosen to have a universal health care system and as such we have to be prepared to accept its cost.
Canada has gone a long way already towards eliminating the concept of individual responsibility and is now beginning to eliminate individual freedom. I would never willingly risk my life to preserve this type of order. I would risk it for freedom however.