At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies considers the state of Canadian media in how they reported on the Maritime provinces’ draconian policies during the ongoing wildfire season:
Screencaptured image of one of the August 2025 wildfires in the Maritimes from Global News via The Rewrite
There will always be conflicts between collective rights and individual liberties. One is valuable in ensuring there is order in society, which is important. The other is necessary to maintain freedom, which lots of people live without but is nevertheless desirable. When there’s too much freedom, people look for politicians who will restore order. When there is too much order, people rebel and demand freedom (see everything from the French Revolution to the Freedom Convoy).
Traditionally, those inclined to the order side if the ledger have been viewed as conservatives while “liberals” have led the fight for individual freedom manifest in the civil rights movement, the emancipation and advancement of women, freedom of speech, etc. that are now viewed as fundamental to the maintenance of a modern, liberal democracy.
But as Pete Townsend wrote a little more than half a century ago, the parting on the left is now the parting on the right (and the beards have all grown longer overnight). Journalists tend to lean left, which means their traditional opposition to the imposition of order has been replaced by a collectivist tendency to sympathize with those imposing it. It is left to the newsroom minorities on the right to carry the torch for individual liberties.
To wit, this CBC story on Nova Scotia’s wild fire-induced ban — enforced with a $25,000 fine until Oct. 15 — on walking anywhere in the woods was oblivious to the impact on personal freedom. Never crossed their minds. When the issue was raised on social media, Twitter journos took up the cause. Stephen Maher dismissed individual liberty concerns as fringe views and maintained that the restrictions could be justified as “reasonable” limitations of Charter rights. While the Globe and Mail‘s editorial board called the Nova Scotia move “draconian”, Globe columnist Andrew Coyne nevertheless wondered “How the hell did the right to walk in the woods of Nova Scotia during a forest fire emergency get elevated into the right’s latest cultural obsession?”
It was left to commentators such as Marco Navarro-Genie to point out the intellectual flaccidity fueling parts of the collectivist argument when New Brunswick followed Nova Scotia’s lead and NB Premier Susan Holt said this:
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 that is, uh, threatening the lives of New Brunswickers.
That, believe it or not, was a good enough explanation for the collectivist thinking in most mainstream newsrooms.
If journalism is to be useful in defending democracy, those involved in it need to be intellectually equipped to understand the stakes. And their first instinct must be to treat the suppression of liberty as a serious issue whenever the powerful indulge in it at the expense of the powerless. That doesn’t mean liberty should always trump order (traffic lights are eminently reasonable). But it does mean that journos should demand that politicians justify their actions rather than simply helping them explain them to the Great Unwashed. To do otherwise is to fail.
