November 18, 2002
In the period leading up to and including November 11, Canadians spend a lot of time talking about freedom. Even the government of Canada used the word, placing an ad in various newspapers saying that "Canadians honour those who have fought and died defending our values, freedom, and democracy." Unfortunately, freedom seems to be only spoken about in this country in an historical context when the people who have given their lives to defend Canada in previous wars are remembered. The rest of the year, Canadians, and especially the government, ignore the concept of freedom. The freedom to use the TTC in rush hour, or to go to a hockey game at the Air Canada Centre or the freedom of our MPs to sit in Parliament without attacks from al-Qaeda doesn’t seem as important as what Roy Romanow is going to say about health care.
The notion of freedom, as opposed to democracy is one of the major things that separate us from Americans. Americans always examine their laws, not only in terms of those laws being beneficial, but in terms of their effect on individual liberty and freedom. In this country we don’t seem to care about the latter. Canadians settle for democracy without any thought given to freedom.
The reason for this is that even though we pay lip service to such notions as free enterprise and peoples’ "rights", we have a socialist mentality and the possibility of an al-Qaeda attack is nowhere near as frightening as having to pay a doctor for medical services. Much of our disregard of freedom and the way we think comes as a result of our health system.
When the concept of socialized medicine was first worked on by the CCF/NDP, it was to be a form of insurance. People who worked hard (and people were expected to work in the olden days) and managed to accumulate assets to take care of their families if something happened to them, would be able to endure prolonged medical treatment and hospitalization before their death without losing everything that they had accumulated. When looked at in this way, it wasn’t difficult to convince Canadians that it was worth paying a higher level of taxes to have this insurance.
The founders of medicare never envisaged a situation where someone could drink 24 bottles of beer, eat a pizza with double Italian sausage and jalepeno peppers and then go to the doctor the next morning because they somehow didn’t "feel well" and not have to pay for it. It was to be an insurance scheme, much like automobile insurance, where totaling the car would be covered but not a burned out headlight. Today, comprehensive medical coverage means never having to pay for any type of medical service. And when this happened, Canadians gave up a lot of their freedom.
Almost everything that we do can affect our health--what we eat and drink, how we work, how we spend our leisure time, what products we use, how we transport ourselves, etc. The government can and does attempt to regulate most aspects of our lives on the basis that since they pay for health care, they have a duty to control our behaviour so as to minimize their costs (or the cost to the taxpayer). One example of this are the laws making the wearing of seatbelts in cars mandatory, laws that are also in existence in the freer United States. There is no doubt that seatbelts save lives but the reverse can be true — there are instances where people are thrown clear of a vehicle that is engulfed in flames and have survived because they were not strapped in. If there were true freedom, individuals would be left to decide for themselves whether or not they wished to use seatbelts.
If the only issue were true safety issues like seatbelts it wouldn’t be so bad, but the government is now declaring war on obesity. They will soon be telling adults what, when and how much they can eat, something that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. Undoubtedly, legislation will come. It is not unforeseeable that regulations will be passed at sometime in the future that dictate how large an order of fries can be at fast food restaurants. And the government can justify intrusions into our lives because of the universality of government-paid health care.
Some other countries are populated by those who have had democracy and freedom taken from them by force. In Canada, we seem to just cede these things to the government. Freedom and liberty do not take priority over not having to pay a doctor for an office visit. Except for a brief period in early November every year, we don’t give freedom a second thought.
Arthur Weinreb is a lawyer and author and Associate Editor of Canadafreepress.com, he can be reached at: aweinreb@interlog.com
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