In this land of peace, order and good government, submitting to laws, regulations, absolute bans on a lot of things and limitations on practically everything else is a national characteristic. I’ve been wondering recently if it isn’t time that we become less docile and more defiant as members of neighbourhoods, communities and regions.
People whine, write letters to the editor, tweet angrily, but still they let governments create whatever disagreeable rules they can get away with. And local governments, bullied by more senior governments, accept without question obligations that put ratepayers to great expense and inconvenience.
Protest is pretty tame in Canada. In Montreal, we have annual demonstrations to protest police brutality and at the same time try to entice it, so next year’s demonstration will have something to protest.
We have the Idle No More folk with their diverse complaints, some more legitimate than others, said to be gearing up for a “Sovereignty Summer” of marching and shouting.
I have great respect for aboriginal leaders and their followers who stand up and speak out against the treatment of what we now call First Nations by the governments of current occupation. So I do for those seeking to preserve and protect habitats.
But they’re protesting responsibilities shirked by governments. What I want to deal with is responsibilities presumed by governments — the rules they lay down for others to enforce, the tasks they set for others to undertake.
I don’t share the belief of that gun-toting rock musician Ted Nugent that “we the people determine our own pursuit of happiness,” which leaves American schools and shopping malls awash in blood. But like Henry David Thoreau, I believe that “that government is best which governs least.”
The trouble with legislators is that they’re inclined to legislate. The trouble with our elected governments and their unelected offshoots at all levels is that they’re itching to govern.
Greeks should set us an example. When a bunch of technocrats in Brussels overthrew Greece’s elected government and imposed financial hardship on the people, several municipalities refused to carry out their orders.
Last week, the Cypriot parliament refused to allow a European Union raid on Cypriots’ bank accounts and forced Brussels to reconsider its draconian terms for a transnational bank bailout.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nanny-like decree to restaurants not to serve sodas in containers bigger than 16 ounces has been crushed by popular outrage, backed by a court’s finding that it was “arbitrary and capricious.”
In his budget last week, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty dangled before businesses the lure of matching grants to take labour-training responsibilities away from provinces, which would also have to pony up matching grants. And he decreed that anyone on First Nations reserves will have to undertake skill development to qualify for social assistance — a clumsy bureaucratic humiliation.
Now. Let’s move to our end of this Island.
The Cowichan Valley Regional District, which one would think has some interest in the health and safety of its residents, has been bypassed by a provincial government that seems determined to have contaminated soil from all over the Island dumped in the watershed near Shawnigan Lake, putting at risk the water supply of many residents.
Capital Regional District politicians decided in secret to turn Esquimalt into a dumping ground for sewage sludge, presumably because the municipality is already designated as the site of a treatment plant that will produce the sludge.
This disgraceful bit of misgovernance comes, of course, because governments higher up have decreed that we must treat our sewage and pay through the nose for doing so. We’ve been told to hold that nose and get on with it simply because, as Stéphane Dion said when he was environment minister, “it’s the right thing to do.” So the province set deadlines.
Well, Esquimalt isn’t amalgamated with its tormenters yet. Its council should assert its right not to be pushed around, as should mayors and councillors serving community interests everywhere.
As the Cyprus parliament told Brussels and Berlin, Esquimalt should tell the CRD, and by extension the province and Ottawa, to back off and think again.
