Canada wants to ram through fascist bike helmet rules - Cycling Mob: Road Cycling, Mountain Biking and More

12-06-2004, 09:51 PM

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Monday, 6 December 2004
Mark Steyn

For half a decade now, Jacob Weisberg of Slate has had a column called
"Bushisms," dependent on the proposition that the president is an
inarticulate moron. No argument there, not from Slate readers. But,
after September 11, Weisberg was sporting enough to force himself to
consider why the moron seemed to be doing a reasonably good job with
the war on terror. His conclusion was that war plays to an idiot's
strengths: "Bush continues to exhibit the same lack of curiosity,
thoughtfulness and engagement with ideas that made him a C student," he
wrote. "And curiously enough, it is these very qualities of mind--or
lack thereof--that seem to be making him such a good war president." In
war, the idiot president comes into his own.

Indeed. Summing up Weisberg's argument, I wrote, "War is a simpleton's
game and does not require the grasp of nuance, subtlety, etc. of more
complex issues such as mandatory federal regulations for bicycling
helmets, or whatever it was Bill Clinton was busy with for eight
years."

I don't know why I picked bicycling helmets. Clinton did not, to the
best of my recollection, actually enact any bicycling-helmet
regulations, but it seemed symbolically consistent with the kind of
micro-politics his administration pursued for eight years--federal
toilet-tank regulations, programs to connect grade schools to the
Internet, etc. On foreign policy and national security, he gave the
impression he was going through the motions, but get him on to some
really pressing, if non-federal, issue--like curfews for teens or the
merits of school uniforms--and he'd come alive. So I started using
"federal bicycling-helmet regulations" as an all-purpose cheap crack
about the indulgent, inverted priorities of the Clinton years.

On the other hand, on all the many occasions I've used my all-purpose
cheap crack, it never occurred to me that it meant anything other than
mandatory bicycling-helmet regulations for children. The notion of
mandatory bicycling-helmet regulations for grown men and women seemed
too preposterous.

I should have known better. The other day, a private member's bill was
introduced in the Ontario legislature requiring every grown-up, before
mounting a bicycle anywhere in the province, from Niagara Falls to
Hudson's Bay, to strap him or herself into a helmet. Needless to say,
the bill was approved on its second reading unanimously.

Have you ever read Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel? Lovely
book. Three chaps bicycling through the Black Forest. On the jacket
they're all wearing plus twos with checked caps. Can't do that in
Ontario.

The Germans made a film of it in the fifties, Immer die
Radfahrer--three hearty Teutons cycling along in their loden huetes
with feathers in the hatbands. Can't do that in Ontario. Seen Jules et
Jim? Love triangle on bicycles: two French blokes plus Jeanne Moreau
tootling through the countryside. Can't do that in Ontario. It wouldn't
work in helmets.

Remember the late Queen Juliana? Holland's famous "bicycling queen"?
She lived in Ottawa during the war, but, if she came back, she'd
discover it's now illegal for a crowned head to bicycle with an
unhelmeted head.

You know the old song, "Daisy, Daisy"?

It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.
It'll be a lot less stylish in Ontario, and how sweet upon the seat
Daisy looks depends on whether she's cool about having a helmet crammed
down on her wedding hairdo.

Or how about The Great Escape? James Coburn gets away on a stolen
bicycle. Can't do that in Ontario. The Bike Reich's Helmet Enforcement
Patrol would have spotted his lack of headgear and returned him to the
camp to be executed.

To call this a "nanny state" is an insult to nannies. When Baron von
Trapp hired Maria to look after all the little von Trapps, he didn't
object to her and the kids riding their bicycles down the lane while
singing "Do-Re-Mi" unhelmeted. Forty years on, the gal who was 16 going
on 17 and the telegraph boy who was 17 going on 18 are 56 going on 57
and 57 going on 58, but in Ontario they're still not old enough to ride
a bicycle without government supervision.

To modify Lord Acton, soft power corrupts absolutely softly: smoothly,
painlessly, totalitarianism-lite advances from hate-crimes to
hat-crimes. As revealing as the inability of any Ontario legislator to
rouse himself to defend the freedom of adult Canadians to conduct their
own risk-evaluations before getting on their bikes, was the dozy
complacency of the press. My old comrade Andrew Coyne was a notable
exception, weighing in with a scathing column on the lack of
"evidentiary basis" for this law. Silly Andrew, obsessed with facts,
statistics, science. For as the editors of the Guelph Mercury headlined
their own thoughts on the subject, "Helmet Law a No-Brainer."

"Anyone using his head should agree that any measures to prevent
serious head injuries are for the common good," pronounced the
editorial, dismissing dissenters as "Don Cherry-type naysayers." Maybe
they should try using their own heads. There's no epidemic of cycling
deaths or cycling head injuries. As Coyne pointed out, if you bike one
thousand kilometres a year (which most cyclists don't), you'd have to
pedal for 10,000 years, on average, to be at risk of dying in a cycling
accident. And even then, if you're sideswiped by a logging truck, the
likelihood of a helmet improving your chances of survival are minimal.

Chris Gilham, who runs the website cycle-helmets.com, has analyzed the
impact of similar laws in Australia. One consequence is that fewer
people bicycle and thus what was meant to be a public health benefit
is, in fact, a public health disaster--"mass discouragement of
society's most popular exercise at a time of soaring obesity."

That sounds right to me. I like to tootle along a country road with the
wind in my hair. If I can't do that, and I have to climb into the body
armour to go down to town, I'll pass. So the question is whether, among
the 70 or 80 cycling fatalities each year, the small number of lives
(if any) saved by wearing a helmet outweighs the social costs of
discouraging what was hitherto an agreeable form of exercise. Another
is whether cycling helmets for the young, in making children even more
top-heavy and impacting their balance, actually increase the risk of
accidents. Maybe the no-brainer crowd at the Guelph Mercury would like
to look into that instead of just parroting big-government bromides.

But, in our increasingly coercive utopia, the bossier types defend such
legislation on the grounds that injured cyclists have to be treated at
public expense. That's actually an argument not against unhelmeted
cycling, but against government health care. But, as decrepit
socialized medical systems creak under the strain, one hears similar
sentiments more and more--doctors in Manchester, England, refusing to
treat patients with heart disease because the patients are smokers,
etc. The inclination of public health systems to make access
conditional on your living your life in approved ways would be
repugnant enough were it uniformly applied. But it's not. Gay sex, for
example, places much greater strains on public health than bicycling
head-injuries, but no government would institute laws on maximum number
of sexual partners or demand proof of extra-strength condom usage. In
its selectivity, soft totalitarianism is more prone to fashion than the
traditional kind. More people are injured each year falling out of bed
than in cycling accidents, but Pierre Trudeau's great dictum that the
government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation prevents our
rulers from mandating compulsory sleeping helmets. For the moment.

Hardly any legislation is a no-brainer. There are always unintended
consequences, most of which could have been foreseen. But, after 9/11,
I started using my bicycling-helmet crack as a convenient shorthand for
the gulf between government's real responsibilities and the irrelevant
trivia it prefers to busy itself with--putting the meddle to the pedal.
Such laws corrode the citizenry's self-reliance and assertiveness--the
qualities that will determine which western nations will survive the
civilizational struggle on which we're embarked. A land in which an
adult cannot evaluate for himself the risks involved in cycling to a
neighbour is not truly free. But soft power is an elusive enemy--a
cotton-candy cocoon of illusory security binding its subjects ever
tighter. Whether or not we reduce any individual head injuries, we
inflict a massive head injury on society as a whole through such laws.
It's time to end the cycle of violence--the small acts of vandalism
against a free people. Rise up, Ontarians! You have nothing to lose but
your bike chains.