Ignorance is not bliss

Posted on March 7, 2023 by Sunny South News

Dear Editor,

MLA Drew Barnes tells us Tamara Lich was “…subject to the most overreach from a government imaginable.”(News- Mar. 1/’23).  His imagination is stultified, and his statement is on par with one by the other Medicine Hat MLA, Danielle Smith, who told us “Those not vaccinated are the most discriminated against group I have seen in my lifetime.”(News- Oct.22/’22)

Please review the following examples of actual, real “government overreach” and “discrimination”, and remember that Ms. Lich and the unvaccinated all had a choice open to them, and they freely made their choices, but Mr. Barnes and Ms. Smith think they should be exempt from the consequences of their choices.  Up to about 100 years ago women were disqualified from voting in federal and provincial elections in Canada. Indigenous people were not allowed to vote federally until well into the 1950s-I don’t have an exact date.

In Alberta, people with mental development problems were sexually sterilized, forcibly, under Social Credit governments from the 1930s to the 1950s. Hutterites were legally prohibited from buying agricultural land- Social Credit, again- until the early 1970s. Also, in about 1934, newspapers and magazines were forbidden from publishing anything about the Alberta Social Credit government unless their news stories were first checked, edited, and approved by that government, under the Accurate News and Information Act.

In Québec, under Premier Maurice Duplessis in the 1940s, Jehovah’s Witnesses had the doors of their places of worship padlocked by the government, solely because of their religion.

In Canada, from 1830 to 1996, there were about 150,000 Indigenous children forced to attend government-mandated, genocidal, residential schools.

Internationally, there are about one million Uigur Muslims in Chinese “re-education” detention, where rape, sexual sterilization and forced labour are government policy.  There are , literally, dozens of examples of genuine government overreach and discrimination, but none can be countenanced under the fatuous, populist thinking of “freedom” fighters like Mr. Barnes and Ms. Smith, for whom facts are unnecessary encumbrances, and for whom only mere beliefs matter.  U.S. president Abraham Lincoln said “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”.

     Gregory R. Côté, Irvine, Alberta