In many respects, social and economic freedoms have improved significantly over the past few decades. Increasingly however, Western governments are implementing a never-ending series of seemingly minor regulations intended to shift personal behavior. This nanny-state approach to social policy is rapidly becoming more than a minor irritation. It is hijacking every facet of government policy, slowly tangling individuals in a web of bureaucracy. In Canada, few studies have tried to measure the degree to which the nanny-state has crept into peoples’ lives. That is why The Frontier Centre for Public Policy created the inaugural Freedom Index, the first attempt to quantify threats to personal liberty in each Canadian province.
The Freedom Index compared Canadian provinces on three basic dimensions – fiscal, regulatory, and personal freedom – comprised of variables ranging from income tax rates to taxi regulations and land-use restrictions. Given the breadth of issues quantified, the Index provides a tool for meaningfully evaluating the burden each provincial government has imposed on its residents. The wide variation found both in individual variables and aggregate scores highlights the extent to which some provinces have deviated from best practices, and that each provincial government has bought into the nanny state to an extent. Aggregating the excessive burden imposed by provincial governments allows citizens to comprehend the extent to which these seemingly minor interventions accumulate and undermine economic and social freedoms.
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