Freedom takes a back seat to bureaucratic convenience

The new pandemic-style rules aren’t about stopping forest fires. They’re about managing risk to public services already stretched too thin

Interview requests

When Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston banned walking in the woods during forestfire season, the justification was simple: safety. Soon after, New Brunswick’s Susan Holt followed his lead.

But when Holt defended the ban publicly, she said something revealing—and troubling.

It wasn’t about fires at all.

“Me going for a walk in the woods is gonna cause a fire. I can understand why people, uh, think that that’s, that’s. That’s ridiculous. But the reality is, it’s not that you might cause a fire, it’s that if you’re out there walking in the woods and you break your leg, we’re not gonna come and get you because we have emergency responders that are out focused on a fire … And if you take your boat out fishing … and you capsize, we’re not gonna be able to come and help you out because our first responders are focused on an immediate and serious threat … it’s the possibility of diverting emergency resources away from where they are really needed.”

Holt’s explanation makes one thing clear: this is not a fire-prevention policy. It’s a restriction on movement designed to protect the system from hypothetical inconvenience.

You may not be injured, and you may not cause any trouble at all, but if you could, and if the government’s resources are busy elsewhere, you can be told to stay home.

The logic is instantly familiar. It’s the same reasoning used during COVID lockdowns. Back then, the danger was not that you, specifically, were sick, but that you might be—and that your illness might contribute to hospital strain. “Flatten the curve” was about protecting system capacity, not eliminating disease.

In short, the forest fire bans recycle the same logic—just in a new setting. They make the public responsible for the state’s operational shortages. Scarcity is managed not by increasing capacity—more firefighters, more rescue crews—but by reducing the public’s freedom to create demand.

It’s worth spelling out the underlying assumptions.

First, the state assumes the right to manage your risk-taking. If your actions could, in theory, lead to a call for help at an inconvenient time, the state may prohibit them. This is an inversion of the citizen-government relationship: your life must adjust to the bureaucracy’s needs, not the other way around.

Second, it assumes that a shortage of services is your problem to accommodate. Instead of fixing the shortage, the government narrows the range of activities you are allowed to pursue.

Finally, it normalizes restrictions based on hypothetical harm. No incident need occur. The mere possibility is enough. That principle, once accepted, has no natural limit—because all human activity carries possible risk.

These assumptions, once accepted, don’t remain isolated.

This is how a pandemic-era mindset migrates into other domains. Once you accept that liberty can be suspended for the sake of “system protection,” the list of triggers grows: forest fire season, peak flu season, snowstorms, police shortages, even energy constraints. The extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the temporary becomes policy.

Politically, the appeal is obvious. Limiting freedom is easier than making tough decisions about resources and figuring out efficiencies. Telling citizens they cannot ski in winter because hospitals are busy is cheaper than staffing those hospitals to handle flu patients and broken legs. Restricting public gatherings because police are committed elsewhere is easier than efficiently allocating officers. Framing it as care, “for your safety,” softens the edge and keeps pushback low.

But it is a profound change in how governments understand their role.

In the traditional view, the state exists to safeguard liberty and provide the means for citizens to live freely despite risk. In this new model, citizens must live cautiously to ensure the state’s ability to function without strain. The system becomes the priority.

Some will dismiss this as a passing irritation, unique to the fire season. But the pandemic proved how quickly “temporary” restrictions can reappear in new forms. The Nova Scotia and New Brunswick bans show that COVID’s logic has been internalized by governments across the political spectrum, including those that identify as conservative.

The problem is not that governments sometimes need emergency powers. The problem is that the threshold for using them now appears to include the prospect of inconvenience to the system.

It is a shift from protecting the public in emergencies to protecting the bureaucracy from strain.

And the cost is not abstract.

Freedom of movement is not a minor liberty. It is a baseline for everything else—for work, for association, for daily life. If it can be revoked because you might twist your ankle while first responders are busy, it can be revoked for almost anything.

The fire season will end. But unless the logic behind these bans is rejected, the season for restrictions will not.

The next emergency—real or perceived—will bring the same refrain: stay home, for the sake of the system. And each time, the public will be expected to accept that liberty is conditional, rationed out only when the government finds it convenient.

That is not the Canadian tradition. That is not how free societies work. And it will only stop when citizens insist that the system exists for them—not the other way around.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).