We need government at root to protect us from other governments (and terrorists), and to administer impartial laws. Adam Smith’s other requisite category of minimal government activity was the provision of infrastructure. Governments have fallen down in all three. The Robert Dziekanski affair — and the efforts by our guardians to blacken the name of the victim and conceal evidence — makes one ashamed to be Canadian. Governments have become more concerned with extending the scope of their redistributional activities in the name of social justice, but in reality in pursuit of buying votes. In the process they have engaged in round after round of disruptive policy innovation, resulting in a huge barnacle accretion of bureaucratic inertia. This is not cynicism, it is reality.

Peter Foster, October 20, 2009