As an ex-Brit living in Canada, let me put in a plug for my adopted homeland. Canada is just too big and has too small a tax base to afford a camera on every street corner. And in the province of Ontario where I live, the provincial government that started putting speed cams on the road was turfed out in favour of the party that promised to remove them. The promise was duly kept and no speed cams for years now.
Some freedoms are eroding though: citizens of both Canada and the US have been happily traveling across the border using just a drivers license for ID for eons, but the US Border folks are working hard to kill that. Clearly drunken teenagers on road trips to Spring Break in Miami and the steady flow of French Canadian strippers and TV news readers are posing major security risks that were somehow unnoticed in days gone by.
And I'm glad to say that Canadians are being active at trying to extend their freedoms to made adult decisions. Regular Canadians, not drugcrazed hippies, have been trying to get their politicians to decriminalize the use of marijuana and we seemed to be edging closer under our last government. Unfortunately the fairly minor freedom to get a good buzz every now and again has been aggressively attacked by US lawmakers who are busy waging a colosally ineffective "war on drugs" and don't seem to want us to have any fun.
In my view it's a bloody shame that the governments who are spearheading freedom drives on the other side of the world are steadily eroding the hard won freedoms of their own citizens and subjects at home.
Maybe Canada will be the future land of the free. It will still be bloody cold though!
Just my $0.02.
Chris
