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Personal Choice and Responsibility

March 1, 2008

As of the beginning of this year, the Calgary Health Region, as part of its war on bad fat, became the first to regulate your food intake by making it illegal to prepare food for sale if it contains more than two per cent trans fats. Restaurants that violate that limit – one that no doubt will be vigorously enforced by enthusiastic fat police – could lose their licence and therefore be forced out of business.The next step, perhaps as soon as October, will be to police food sold in Calgary supermarkets, etc., for the purpose of limiting trans fats despite the fact levels are already, by legislation, printed on the packages. It is safe to assume that within a couple of years some unfortunate grocer will be busted on charges of selling food that contains trans fats beyond two per cent. This is due to the city’s health department having assessed that the risk posed by trans fats is “unacceptable.” This is an interesting new expansion into the world of personal choice and responsibility. Anti-smoking legislation, at least to the extent that it is practised in most parts of the country, can be justified on the basis of either: a) the majority of people do not smoke nd find smoke objectionable; or b) while people may have the right to engage in unhealthy behaviour they do not have the right to expose others, unwillingly, to those same risks. The latter justification has already been used to insist on the listing of ingredients on food packaging in order that the public can make an informed decision whether to consume it or otherwise. But this latest step has firmly shifted the responsibility for these decisions away from the consumer and into the loving arms of the state which has made it clear Calgarians are incapable of making these decisions themselves. This is not surprising in an age where governments decide which light bulbs you may and may not buy. Certainly the reduction of trans fats in food is a good thing, such a good thing that consumers were already well on the way, with relatively benign assistance from the state, to forcing food providers to change. But adding more fruit and fibre to one’s diet is also a good thing, as is walking a couple of miles a day, drinking eight glasses of water, eating broccoli on a daily basis and avoiding too much sugar or carbohydrates. Alcohol, for that matter, poses considerable – perhaps even unacceptable – risk to personal health as do certain personal behaviours (sexual and otherwise). Having assigned itself the task of guarding our arteries from the clogging caused by abuse of trans fats, it is difficult to understand how our chief medical officer of health can justify standing idly by while people offer rum and coke for sale with apparently no regard for its enormous physical and mental health risks. Nor, for that matter, does it make much sense for men over 50 to be “free” to avoid an annual prostate exam. This is not to be critical of Dr. Brent Friesen. He is a public servant assigned a task of considerable importance in our community and it must be incredibly frustrating for him to watch as people repeatedly make poor decisions. Many Alberta conservatives no doubt feel the same way about Ontario voting patterns as Friesen’s office feels about the average citizen’s attention to health care. What should be of concern, however, is how casually these interventions, whether they be restrictions on the freedom to (wrongly) choose trans fats fries or the increasingly controversial restrictions on freedom of speech by somewhat oxymoronic human rights commissions, are accepted. Freedoms, big and small, are precious and important to a robust democracy. Any time there is a move to expand the scope of their restrictions, there should be vigorous debate and the burden of proof should be firmly placed upon the he or the she who wishes to deny them. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Hardly happens at all, in fact. And that, too, poses an “unacceptable” risk to a healthy society.