In the United States they are lamenting a government intrusion into religious freedom as the Obama healthcare mandate forces religious groups to act against their faith.
In the US they are losing freedom but today here in Canada freedom is expanding.
Western grain farmers are today getting the chance to walk away from the Wheat Board and sell the product they grow on their land to who they want.
Late Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier said that “Canada is free and freedom is its nationality.”
For a long time that wasn’t true. Everywhere there were attempts to expand government control and those attempts are still there but they are not winning at every turn as they once did and the forces calling for greater government control of your life have lost some key battles.
Whether you farm or not, ending the Wheat Board monopoly is a major gain for freedom.
Can you imagine owning your own business and then one day the government comes in and says that from this day forward you can only sell to one customer – us.
It is outrageous and were it proposed today it would be laughed at.
Your restaurant can only sell meals to government workers. Your car company can only sell to the government and then we will sell the cars for you.
Statements like that would not be taken seriously yet the Wheat Board, which limited wheat and barley farmers to one customer was just that, the government dictating who your one and only customer would be.
In the last year we have seen the end of the long gun registry, which was a win for freedom.
We have seen the end of the internet censorship portion of the Canadian Human Rights Act – section 13.1.
And if we keep pushing, we can gain more freedom.
Right now there is a court case trying to expand freedom in health care, the same way they have in Quebec, they want that in Alberta.
That’s a good thing. Provincial health systems ration healthcare and prevent doctors from doing surgery. It’s not that the doctors can’t or won’t fix your hip, it’s that the provinces won’t pay the doctor, the nurses or for the hospital bed or the operating room. Healthcare choice could fix some of that.
We need school choice so that the educrats don’t control what your kids learn at a big, remote centralized bureaucracy. Parents are their child’s first educator and teachers are teachers not co-parents.
We need freedom in hiring for employers.
Right now the federal government is involved in race based hiring and programs for special groups including language based hiring to meet quotas. What’s worse is that they try and force this on private companies that want to do business with the federal government. That needs to end.
We need to end a bilingualism policy that rather than providing services where warranted tries to spread an unwanted government social policy across the country.
But we also need to stay vigilant.
People that want to mandate what size of soft drink you can buy or how much salt you can use in your meal are not confined to New York City.
There are nanny staters like Michael Bloomberg everywhere. In Vancouver they want to control your street meat at the hot dog cart so that you have to eat humus and not hot dogs.
In the last election the Liberals and NDP ran on starting a national daycare program so that the educrats could get your kids at six months instead of four or five years of age. They made it sound like they were doing it for you, to make your life easier and give you what you want but really it was about government power.
Remember a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
But for today, freedom is expanding, farmers are breathing the fresh air of freedom. That’s something to celebrate.
And that`s the Byline.
Categories: Byline
