Letter: We need to establish the limits

By Letter to the Editor on June 8, 2022.

Dear editor,

Now that we can eat in restaurants again the focused attention on freedom appears to be largely fading and “life goes on.”

But a subtle shift in attitude seems to have occurred, and without due consideration. Rather than individual responsibility, family and community supports, we now look even more to government.

Pierre Trudeau famously rationalized “there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” when legalizing casual divorce. Only a few decades later, in an ironic twist, we have the state rationalizing a reach far beyond our bedrooms, involving itself in the bodies of individuals and mandating the medications they must take.

Have we now shifted to an assumption that there are no inherent limits to government control, we only need a sufficient crisis? Family relationships (as only one example) are not created by government, should they now be “managed” by it, and especially in a crisis? If a business (or association, church or family) can be told when doors can open, how often, how many people can enter and what they must wear, is it a really a business, or is it an arm of the government? Dependence surrenders control. Our willingness to look primarily to government agencies promising to protect us from harms, leads to a state which takes our freedoms away in the name of the “greater good.” The truckers have highlighted something worth serious reflection; we need to establish the limits. Considering the need for checks against government overreach will be our duty, if we want to retain the personal freedoms we appear to have taken for granted and, hopefully briefly, traded away.

Gordon Dykstra

Medicine Hat

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