by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-12 22:56:13+00:00
It seems we are just going to fundamentally disagree on the position that rights can be restricted in the name of a healthy society. You think that rational actions that restrict your rights during an emergency are unacceptable and a slippery slope to authoritarianism. I understand your viewpoint, and even agree in certain cases, I just disagree that temporary restrictions on land use passed by fairly elected representatives using normal government processes lead to authoritarianism. No one is acting outside of the authority vested in them by the people. If we think they shouldn't have that power, this specific action can be challenged at the ballot box, in the courts, or in the legislature. That is hardly authoritarianism by any definition.

As I stated before, my belief (backed by centuries of examples, philosophy and legal precedent) is that individual rights are almost always in tension with a functioning society. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, in the same way that your right to play in the woods ends at our collective ability to control wildfires during record setting danger.

If you or anyone causes a fire through recklessness or, as I amply demonstrate below, completely normal human activity like driving a car, there is a good chance that you will do more damage than you could hope to pay for in your entire life. When your right to go for a walk in the woods comes with an appreciable chance of destroying an entire town, it is totally reasonable that the townspeople want you to, pretty please, postpone your walk until it rains.

> Evidence and data? Cars regularly go off-roading in brush and don’t start fires. If you’re saying it is incredibly rare and due to some faulty car part, then I don’t think that deserves regulation. That’s not the “40% of wildfires” you referenced as justification for this action. To make this more obvious - lightning can also start wildfires and they’ll keep happening at some low rate. Why would you try to eliminate one in a billion rarities through broad violations of liberties

Vehicles go off-roading in the bush and regularly start wildfires. The fact that they sometimes don't doesn't prove anything. You are dangerously wrong here. I took it as so well-known a fact that I didn't think I needed this:

Off-road motorcycles and ATVs are sold from the factory with legally required wildfire prevention equipment for this reason. Getting caught removing your spark arrestor is grounds for a massive fine. Here's a fire from this year started by an off-road motorcycle https://www.squamishchief.com/local-news/update-dirt-bike-ma...

Cars caused wildfires are incredibly common. So common that most wildfire departments have pages warning people of steps that they can take to help prevent them. Here is one of a litany of pages I was able to find with the search phrase "car caused wildfire" https://azdot.gov/blog-article/preventing-vehicle-caused-wil.... Bonus: that one cites several fires that were caused by cars.

Here is a specific fire caused by a car that caused over a billion dollars of damage including eight people burned to death and 1k homes destroyed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carr_Fire.

Here is a car caused fire in BC. The reckless rascals who caused it? The RCMP underwater search team got a flat tire responding to a missing swimmer. Bonus: that town completely burned in 2021 and the most likely cause of that fire? Sparks from a malfunctioning train wheel. Lightning might not strike twice, but in this case vehicle caused fires have. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fire-lytton-...

They are INCREDIBLY common, and more to the point, have no correlation with whether or not you are being reckless.

They are demonstrably not '1 in a billion'. They are on the order of 1 in a hundred at the low end. An order of magnitude higher than that by many estimates: Calfire estimates 10 percent of human caused fires originate from vehicles.

We can't stop lightning, but we can stop the 40% of wildfires in Canada that are human caused. Some wildfires are caused by people doing illegal things like campfires in a fire restriction, but a surprising amount of them are caused by people doing totally normal things. Here's someone that caused a wildfire by mowing their lawn: https://kmph.com/news/local/french-fire-cause-improper-lawn-...

Simply put, when conditions are like this, it is so stupidly easy to accidentally start a fire, that restricting people from the woods really does appreciably decrease risk.

> The way your list of things that you feel are not rights reads to me, is “Canada has no rights, and therefore your arguments that people have rights is false”.

I didn't say that Canadians don't have rights. I said that you are claiming that there are certain specific rights for Canadians, when in fact, that is not true. It is very easy to prove that Canadians do not have a right to own guns, hell, even the American "right" to guns is severely limited (Felons? Artillery? Many modifications like short barrelled shotguns?). It is also very easy to prove that Canadians do not have a right to unrestricted access to publicly owned land, or is the "no vehicles" gate at my nearest park put up by a dictator?