Upon receiving a flyer recently from my local MLA describing the achievements of my provincial government, I noticed that 75 per cent of these accomplishments involved the banning of something.

These bans range from the quite reasonable (asbestos) to the predictably Draconian (fatty foods, flavoured tobacco). The language of these new bans make heavy use of the word “prohibit,” which, more accurately, means to “criminalize.” Failure to comply with these bans mean fines and warnings at first and, in some cases, the slammer.

For those in favour of government’s increasing incursions into our personal lives, our physical bodies, our minds and what culture we have left that hasn’t been arts-council funded into oblivion, disaster has once again been averted.

We have been saved from destroying (or having to entertain) ourselves, but the government must remain vigilant.

In celebration of their vigilance, here are my three personal favourite bans in recent memory in ascending order of my willingness to actually go to jail for violating them:

1. Many provinces have recently adopted child-seat laws stating that children must ride a booster seat until they are a minimum of 4’9” or 80 pounds or at least nine years old, and there’s no reason to believe this isn’t coming to Manitoba. Remember that road trip to Halifax when, in the back of the station wagon, your brother tried to put you in the camel clutch whenever you beat him? Yeah, dude, that’s way illegal now. Not even close to legal. Your dad should actually be in jail.

2. A bill was introduced this summer by Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP MP for Winnipeg North, to criminalize the sale of small individual cigarillos and tobacco products containing fruit flavor. Remember that time in high school when you smoked four cigarillos and puked? That’s now illegal. Those memories might as well be illegal. The man that sold you those will literally go to jail if he doesn’t comply.

3. At last we arrive at my favourite criminalization of the normal activities of a dynamic and functioning society, the one for which I would most relish fighting until they threw me in jail: Standing while drinking. This little gem I noticed when I was standing on the patio outside of the Toad in the Hole on Osborne. This is not a joke. The Manitoba Liquor Control Commission has posted a sign stating that while they will permit me to participate in the activity of drinking an alcoholic beverage with like-minded individuals, what I may not do is stand while doing so. You want to stand? Well, let’s see how you like standing ... in jail.

We could debate the merits of each of these bans forever. Some children do start smoking because of fruit flavored tobacco (most start because of a lack of parenting). Some children are killed in car accidents because they weren’t in a booster seat.
People get drunk in public and cause undue harm to others and themselves. But people also trip and fall down stairs.

They scrape their knees, they cut their fingers and the floss sometimes breaks and gets stuck between their teeth and it takes days to actually get it all out of there. Only those who have the luxury of making it their full time job to tell you how to protect you from yourself could come to the conclusion that most of our problems stem from a lack of regulation rather than a lack of personal responsibility.

The more they regulate, the more they are able to justify their existence. In turn, the more they are able to justify their existence, the more they regulate. So beware, for their days are long, their budgets large and the slope is slippery.

Gareth du Plooy is a first-year science student at the University of Winnipeg.

Published in Volume 64, Number 11 of The Uniter (November 12, 2009)