"Health Canada considers
sweeping ban on junk food ads aimed at children and teens." So reads the
headline at CBC News.
And with that matter-of-fact announcement -- just a normal day's political news
in the true north weak and socialist -- a nation quietly declares itself lost
to freedom forever. D-Day memories of the brave Canadians at Juno Beach washed
away in a tide of authoritarian progressivism. Freedom traded for paternalistic
social engineering in the name of protecting children from over-salted cheese. "Most of the foods that are
marketed to kids are these ones that are high in fat, high in sugar, high in
sodium, so that's what we're looking at," said Hasan Hutchinson, director
general at Health Canada, who is overseeing the consultations.
"That would then cut out all of
the things like, of course, your regular soda, most cookies, cakes, pies,
puddings, ice cream, most cheeses because they are high in fat, they're high in
salt," he said. Health Canada would also target foods such as
sugar-sweetened yogurt, frozen waffles, fruit juice, granola bars and potato
chips.
When Canada elected Justin Trudeau,
the foppish son of the foppish Maoist Pierre, I warned that
what little was left of Canada as a representative democracy was on the verge
of being swept into the ash heap of history by a wave of kneejerk neo-Marxist
populism -- imagine Barack Obama without any constitutional limits. Many of my
fellow Canadians -- collectively the most self-righteous "nicest people"
in the world -- accused me of overreacting to this disturbing new wave of
nihilistic Trudeaumania, or of exaggerating the ideological seriousness of
"young Trudeau," as they breathlessly dubbed him.
But there is no way to overreact to
the political dangers of a nationwide personality cult. And far from
exaggerating Trudeau's ideological purity, my point was precisely that Canada
had fallen to such a level of ethico-political degradation that no ideologue
was necessary to tip the scales toward totalitarian government; a vapid,
politically correct attention-seeker would do the trick well enough.
And so he has, as his government has
aligned itself with that of Kathleen Wynne, the Marxist premier of Ontario --
the country's most populous province -- to produce government in a politburo
style, with naturally curly hair. From legal preferences for sexual deviancy to
legal punishments for emitting carbon, from Castro-loving to Christian-hating,
and from outlawing criticism of Islam to normalizing drug abuse, Trudeau's
government is checking all the Euro-socialist boxes, all the while hiding
behind the leader's pretty-boy celebrity and prime ministerial pedigree.
But to remind everyone of that
pedigree, Pierre Trudeau was the man who, through his panache and his clever
exploitation of social trends of the 1960s and '70s, shifted Canada irrevocably
leftward: a close friend of Fidel Castro, a vocal admirer of Mao Tse-tung, and
thus North America's first openly communist-sympathizing national leader,
preceding Obama by forty years.
Beyond all its legislative
radicalism, the first Trudeau era was most significant for nudging Canadians
into a gradual acceptance of a principle quite out of step with Western
classical liberalism, but perfectly
in keeping with Eastern collectivist authoritarianism, namely that the state is
not a representative of the people whose interests it serves, but rather the
rightful micromanager and mother hen of men's daily lives, determining and
enforcing correct attitudes and preferred interest groups with impunity and
without restraint. In short, neo-Maoism.
Now "young Trudeau's"
government is proposing a "sweeping ban" on the marketing of legal
food products. The absurdity of this proposal is outdone only by its
paternalistic offensiveness.
And lest we fall into the common
error of imagining that progressivism is purely a "left-right" issue,
it should be noted that one of the backers of this push for the selective
violation of free speech and parental authority is a Conservative senator, Nancy
Greene Raine -- an iconic Canadian skiing champion, who has apparently decided
to take the whole country downhill with her this time.
"Some products that are being
marketed to children are, in my mind, very harmful," she says. And so,
with a progressive authoritarian's typically deliquescent moral reasoning, Greene
Raine blithely determines that anything harmful "in her mind" ought
simply to be outlawed, rather than argued against.
Whence comes the authority, let
alone the gall, of the government of an ostensibly free country to propose
something as presumptuously dictatorial as a ban on free speech regarding
unhealthy foods? Why is the government in the business of deciding which foods
are healthy or unhealthy in the first place? And how unhealthy does a food have
to be before it is caught under this authoritarian umbrella? Is there a scale
of unhealthiness that would make any sense here?
And what if a product, say, peanut
butter, is judged healthy enough to be marketed to children, though it is known
to be literally toxic to a small number of people? Don't those children with
peanut allergies have the same "right" to protection from unhealthy
advertising (i.e., speech) as everyone else? Should the government therefore
curtail advertising on every product that is known to have, or is suspected of
having, a potentially harmful effect on the health of any child,
in the name of "fairness"?
And by "child," here, it
is worth noting that the proposed restrictions would apply to marketing aimed
at anyone up to seventeen years of age. Thus, a Canadian may be legally old
enough to drive a car, or even get married, but still warrant nanny-state
protection against Oreo cookies.
Isn't it interesting that the same
government that thinks it has the moral authority to ban the marketing of
unhealthy food products has no qualms about children listening to today's
over-sexualized, mind-numbing, taste-demolishing pop music. Is moral health
less important than physical health from the point of view of a national government?
If you have read Brave New World, or listened to Michelle Obama
rant about broccoli while praising Beyoncé's hooker act as an empowering model
for girls, you already know the answer.
Isn't it telling that the same
progressives who believe companies should not be allowed to market sugary
cereal to teenagers are actively encouraging those teenagers to
"experiment" with their sexuality, while simultaneously teaching them
that it is unacceptable, in fact criminally "phobic," to oppose
unlimited immigration from Muslim countries, or to question the
pseudo-religious practice of female genital mutilation? In fact, the two
perspectives are consistent, in that both entail the state regulation of
individual life and conscience in the name of the universal progressive
religion, Holier-than-thou-ism.
Several years ago, a Liberal Party
spokesman publicly criticized a Conservative Party plan to fund child care
through direct subsidies to parents by saying ordinary people would just use
the money to buy beer and popcorn. This "gaffe" perfectly
encapsulates the progressive mind. Private citizens cannot be trusted to act
responsibly and take care of themselves. In fact, private citizens are not
rational beings at all, but only an unindividuated mass easily directed by
temptations and desires of the moment. (A self-fulfilling progressive prophecy,
of course, since public education and generations of welfare statism produce
exactly such a morally limp citizenry.) Only the state, from the progressive
point of view, can be trusted to choose properly for everyone.
The proposal to ban the marketing of
"junk food" may seem minor to those disinclined to focus on
underlying principles. But it is important because it indicates the extent to
which a nation with a classical liberal heritage may be gradually, peacefully
divested of all moral and political principle through generations of public
schooling and progressive propaganda. It is not difficult to foresee where this
degraded national soul tends, once unleashed to the degree we see today.
For once, the principle has been
established that the government supersedes parents in the task of managing the
daily habits and sensibilities of children, what is to prevent the same
government, or a subsequent one, from criminalizing parents who
offer unhealthy foods to their children? Or parents who do anything else the
government has deemed "unhealthy"? There would be no principle to
stand on in opposing such measures, and progressives know it. This gradualism,
of course, establishing or undermining a principle in order to grease the skids
for subsequent degradations is what puts the progress in progressivism.
And in the interim, regulations such
as this proposed ban on advertising of unhealthy foods targeting children
achieve the ultimate progressive aim of totalitarian control stealthily, by
psychological manipulation. Make advertising certain products illegal, and the
products acquire a stigma that will slowly cause even responsible parents to
think twice before offering a treat to little Johnny for finishing his math
problems. Then comes the day when Mom notices the other mothers at ballet
rehearsal looking askance at her for offering her daughter a slice of cheese,
those other mothers having previously been pressured into doubting their own
behavior by these same regulations.
The Chinese turned this method of
combining micro-regulation with neighborhood peer pressure and spying into an
art form, but it is often used in North America as well, as it was, for
example, to stigmatize spanking as child abuse, and as it now being used in the
opposite direction to normalize transgenderism. That Canada's liberal elite
would take a page from Mao's playbook is hardly surprising. In fact, that has
been their dream for fifty years.
The piece I wrote in the immediate
aftermath of Justin Trudeau's election was somewhat facetiously titled
"Whither Canada?" Now, sadly, we know. Pierre Trudeau's dream of a
Castroite, Maoist Canada, unrealizable in his lifetime, now looks all too
plausible, thanks to the poster boy vacuity of his son, the nostalgic Marxism
of "liberals" like Kathleen Wynne, and the sleepy conscience of a
nation that has utterly succumbed to the allure of soft despotism.
No comments:
Post a Comment