Category: nannystate

Some aspects of curious Canadian farming regulations…

…and the Conservative government’s response to one of them (but they won’t dare touch the other). Publius gets his hands dirty:


Back in my undergraduates days I came across an article on the CWB. It was oddly fascinating. I looked upon it as some bizarre aberration, a historical quirk as not yet remedied. In modern day Canada a farmer could go to jail for selling wheat. To my mind it was absurd enough to go to jail for selling marijuana, but wheat? I had images of men in John Deere caps, half-hidden by the shadows of Regina’s back alleys, furtively glancing and quickly whispering: Durum?
From there I was brought into contact with the upside down world of supply management. Having been raised on the notion that food should be cheap, so that the poor would not go wanting, I found myself confronted with a government conspiracy to aide and abet the looting of the ordinary consumer. Here were actual Robber Barons, not the wrongly maligned the industrial titans of Gilded Age America. If there was one single event that drove home to me the inherent madness of statism, supply management was it…

Fly “Les Cieux Amicaux”

Americans! Watch out for the language police:

Flying the bilingual skies
The Tories [Conservatives] moved to extend the grasp of the official languages commissioner on Monday when they introduced an amendment to the Air Canada Public Participation Act that would make not only Air Canada subject to official bilingualism (it always has been), but also all of its “contracted carrier partners.” Now, if you fly United Airlines – or any other carrier that has a contract to provide regional or international flights on behalf of Air Canada – you can demand the same level of bilingual service found on the main airline…

You Poor Oppressed Americans…

…ground down by your false consciousness (many up here think similarly about Canadian society)–from the estimable George Will:


Many members of the liberal intelligentsia, that herd of independent minds, agree that other Americans comprise a malleable, hence vulnerable, herd whose “false consciousness” is imposed by corporate America. Therefore the herd needs kindly, paternal supervision by a cohort of protective herders. This means subordination of the bovine many to a regulatory government staffed by people drawn from the clever minority not manipulated into false consciousness.
Because such tutelary government must presume the public’s incompetence, it owes minimal deference to people’s preferences. These preferences are not really “theirs,” because the preferences derive from false, meaning imposed, consciousness. This convenient theory licenses the enlightened vanguard, the political class, to exercise maximum discretion in wielding the powers of the regulatory state…

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