Article content continued

As the state casually breaks its traditional restraints, we lose something very precious.

Empowering some bureaucrat to breeze in and fish through your medical files may make people less willing to seek help. It certainly diminishes us as individuals by depriving us of a sphere into which the policeman’s truncheon may not extend.

I’m all for rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. As John Locke says, we enter into societies and create governments because our inherent human rights are very hard to protect, in a state of nature, against organized or chaotic violence. But Locke also calls the notion that by entering into society we might lose the very rights we created government to protect “too gross an absurdity for any man to own.” Not any more.

Remember that the key feature of government, technically speaking, is coercion. It is the entity within the community that enforces a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. And while many governments through history have made a mockery of that legitimacy, from Xerxes’ to Stalin’s, in principle the state needs this power to prevent, deter and punish crime, and to repel invasions and put down insurrections. But not everything is Caesar’s.

One need not be religious to see that there ought to be things beyond the reach of the coercive power of the state, and of our fellows via the state, no matter how noble their motives. It’s not just that, human nature being what it is, power corrupts. It’s that government exists to protect our right to live our own lives, including our privacy in intimate moments happy, tragic or merely embarrassing. As the state casually breaks its traditional restraints, we lose something very precious.

Bill 41 was opposed by the Tories and NDP. But it passed with troublingly little notice or outcry. As Tocqueville also warned, “Subjection in minor affairs… does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…”

Caesar should salute us on our way to the doctor, not the reverse.