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Federal Politics

Canada, the Gotcha! Nation

Why do we so relish rules? Because we so love to snare and punish.

Patrick Parkes 29 Aug 2014TheTyee.ca

Patrick Parkes is a washed up union activist. Find his previous Tyee articles here.

This summer, while visiting Pacific Rim National Park, a pair of German tourists stopped me to ask about parking. I had a parking permit, but they didn't, and they wanted to know where to get one. All around us were signs indicating fines for failing to display a parking pass. Curious to them -- but not to me -- there were no instructions on where to get one, and all I could tell them was where I got mine, some 20 minutes away.

"That's Canada," I told them. "We make rules, make it really hard to follow the rules, and then fine you for breaking them."

"We have lots of rules in Germany, too," one of them replied. Perhaps he thought I being facetious or a little too hard on my own country.

"That's not what I mean," I replied. "I'm not talking about the number of rules, but the objective of rules. It's different here. You probably think the rules here relate, in some way, to their overt purpose."

I let them know I was indeed familiar with the rule-bound cultures of northern Europe, that I briefly visited Germany and Sweden, and years ago had been an exchange student in Denmark.

Northern Europeans, I observed, are big on rules about lots of things: about how and where to ride your bike (in separated lanes at the side of every road), drink beer (anywhere you like), walk around naked (90 per cent of the beaches), urinate (in washrooms, which are abundant in public places), camp on private property (as long as the owners can't see you), and take ownership of a suite (just by living in it continuously for a certain number of years). In other words, rules over there are all about regulating freedoms and making it easy for people to get along.

The German tourists agreed that, yes, I had given a fair depiction of the purpose for rules in their part of the world, and they expressed interest in learning how Canadians see things differently.

In Canada, I explained, the whole point of rules is to slip people up because, for us, rules don't exist to regulate freedoms, but to create opportunities for punishment -- or at least to collect fines, since we believe in user fees rather than taxation.

The Germans found this very interesting, and asked me to provide specific examples in order to assist them in not making faux pas during the remainder of their journey. Fortunately I was able to oblige their request with ease, and have decided to share here -- for a general audience -- some of what I related.

How we set people up for punishment

When addressing the uninitiated, alcohol is a good starting point in helping to explain Canada's entrapment-like regulatory schemes: alcohol is legal, apparently, but if you go to a park and open a beer, you'll soon find the place surrounded by police cars.

To be sure, our alcohol regulations aren't unique. Similar regulations can be found in a number of countries (mostly other former British Colonies, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and a few other places). So if alcohol regulations in isolation don't convey our emphasis on punishment, it is perhaps more convincing to examine a particularly Canadian alcohol related historical event: the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot.

The riot followed a brief period which members of the public were encouraged by the local government to have open-air parties in celebration of a sport in which the players beat on one another. To facilitate the party, liquor stores and bars were kept open, and party-goers began to emulate the sports players -- and that's when the real party, so to speak, got started. After the rioting was completed, upstanding citizens were provided numerous opportunities to feign outrage that rules of public order had been broken. They involved themselves in "community building" exercises through which volunteers collected evidence to have the offenders punished in court trials, called up offenders' employers to have them fired, and stood on street corners displaying photos of the offenders in order to shame them and their families -- among other things.

That was the whole point of the Stanley Cup Parties-cum-Riots, and we can see in many other places, too, how Canadians' regulatory attitudes focus mainly on entrapment and/or creating a venue for sanctimonious outrage. Here are some more examples:

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