FREEDOM and democracy are powerful words. So, like any powerful tool or weapon, they should be used carefully and thoughtfully.
The appeal to freedom is powerful because all of us want and need to be able to make choices about the direction of our own lives. But although we make many choices as individuals, and hence are morally accountable for them, we don’t make those choices in isolation. Our choices affect others. And their decisions affect us.
In a democracy, we get to participate in the key decisions that affect all of us. Democracy is a balance between individual freedom to choose and collective parameters that prescribe and afford the choices available to these individual citizens.
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We cannot flourish as human beings without being able to make choices that express our personalities, preferences, interests and values.
So if freedom is about making choices, then having more choices equals more freedom, right? Not so fast.
A lot depends on the scope and importance of the choices being offered. Having a large number of minor items to choose between might give you the illusion that you are enjoying a lot of freedom.
For example, while it might add to the fun of shopping, do dozens of kinds, sizes and colours of soaps really enhance your life in important ways? And what if the only water you have to wash in is polluted? The number and variety of soaps on offer doesn’t matter much if you can’t get clean no matter which soap you choose because of the substandard quality of all the available water.
The quality of the options is usually far more important for genuine freedom and well-being than the sheer number of choices available.
That’s why the current debate about grain marketing cannot be resolved with the simple “more choices equal more freedom” equation.
Removing the single desk or monopoly selling power from the Canadian Wheat Board would allow western Canadian farmers to choose between grain buyers. In the choices tally, the one option of selling through a single desk would be removed and replaced with the option of selling to private grain exporting entities. This second option offers a variety of choices within it.
Taking away the CWB monopoly radically alters the quality of the choices for all farmers. That’s why that other powerful word, democracy, comes into play. Like water quality standards, marketing regulations have great public impact. A few polluters upstream, even if they are soap manufacturers, will ruin the water quality for everyone along the river.
And given the impact that water quality has on health, economics and well-being, wouldn’t it be wise to give up all the choices between soaps in exchange for clean water?
Minimally all the families living along that river should have a say in which of those options are chosen.
Likewise, the farm families whose livelihoods and futures will be altered by the loss of the CWB marketing power should have a choice in the matter. That’s the democratic option.
Nettie Wiebe is a farmer in the Delisle, Sask., region and a professor of Church and Society at St. Andrews College in Saskatoon.
