What can we expect from Government, and what price do we really pay?
An essential difference between those guided by common sense and those who believe that government, (ever increasing in size) can provide the essentials of life, falls between the definitions of ‘wants’ versus ‘needs.’
In this pandemic governed society, government has allowed itself the opportunity to take on ‘emergency’ powers permitting it to dictate our movements and actions in ways that we would never have considered reasonable before. It has set aside the normal administration of justice by permitting its agents, to direct activities and levy fines and which are, by statute, the responsibility of legislatures and the courts.
We have seen federal and provincial governments use the pandemic as justification to make huge financial disbursements with no effective plan or oversight, the consequences of which will leave our great-grandchildren with the obligation of repayment.
In a democracy, we accept these actions because we accept the judgements of those, we elect to manage our society, to take the necessary action to meet the ‘needs’ of all of us. To be effective as a democracy, we need to regularly revisit the outcomes of their decisions to see whether they simply addressed loosely defined ‘wants’ that had little to do with reasons involved with a pandemic.
In an effective democracy citizens should hold all representatives, found to have overstated the requirement, personally responsible for their actions and assign them some very heavy penalties.