Critics are chastising the Ontario government's decision to allow smoking rooms to be built inside provincially owned casinos but not bars and restaurants.
The casino plan quietly received the green light as revenues plummet because of the tough, new no-smoking law.
The Smoke Free Ontario Act, which became law last June, prohibits bars and restaurants from providing its patrons with smoking rooms.
Province-owned casinos in Niagara Falls and Windsor have been building such shelters for gamblers who like to smoke.
The ruling Liberal government says it is not being hypocritical, despite cries of using a legal loophole.
Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson says casinos can build smoking shelters because their primary business is gambling, not serving alcohol and food.
A good indication of the moral corruption that attends progressive statism is the frequency and degree to which government exempts itself from laws and strictures it imposes on the general population. Everybody loves a good scandal, but our outrage over corrupt lawbreakers is rarely matched by outrage over corrupt lawmakers. We rend our garments over predictable, individual cheaters like bribe-takers and civil servants that spend $200 for lunch, and then shrug off the special lawful privileges of our rulers.
The classic example is the old hard currency shops reserved for high officials and party members in communist regimes, which Westerners routinely trotted out as shocking and morally reprehensible and something they would never, ever abide. Their equanimity over equally outrageous special treatment for the high and mighty at home gives the lie to that. In Canada, every politician who hopes for re-election pledges undying fealty to universal health care, yet parliamentarians, senior political advisors and senior civil servants (and their families) have no-wait access to a first-class, state-of-the-art military hospital in Ottawa. Workers on Parliament Hill enjoy none of the employment and human rights protections imposed on private enployers, not even longstanding ones relating to severance and notice that even conservatives now believe have existed since time immemorial. The tax man is the only creditor lawfully permitted to collect a debt before he establishes any liability for it.
Yet over and over they tell us it is for our own good that they not be bound by what they fetter the rest of us with. And over and over again, we buy it.
2 comments:
I imagine that the exemption is more to buttress state revenues from the casinos than to give perks to party apparatchiks. This is more an example of how the state corrupts the morals of the public when it becomes dependent on "sin" revenue, either through taxes which are ostensibly intended to punish sins like smoking or drinking.
The good thing about sin revenues, from the state's standpooint, not from the public's, is that they remain fairly steady through good and bad economic times. I haven't seen any data on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they actually increase in bad economic times.
In these instances the state is basically coopting organized crime by providing the services that the criminals would otherwise dominate if they were illegal.
The U.S. state of Utah doesn't allow smoking in restaurants either, but at least we have the common sense to allow completely-enclosed smoking rooms in such establishments. The demand for them isn't high, however. Most people appear to be resigned to going out into the rain and snow to get their fix.
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