Crucial battle lost
"Your papers, please!" National identity cards are unnecessary and a potentially dangerous assault on our freedoms. Unfortunately, people have been convinced that the little plastic photo identification cards are a vital element of their citizenship.
Pierre Lemieux - September 29, 2008
When you vote in the upcoming federal election, a subtle change will have happened. Most people won’t notice it. Most people don’t notice when traditional liberties are being slowly taken away from them.
Voting without government ID papers will have become much more difficult. Bill C-31, adopted last year with the votes of the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the Bloc Québécois, strengthened ID requirements for voters. Somebody who wants to vote, even if he is on the permanent register of voters, must now prove his identity and address, which involves showing an official ID card like a driver’s licence.
There are alternatives to producing such “government-issued photo ID” (as goes the American-imported mantra), but they involve some annoyance like bringing “two original pieces of identification authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada. Both pieces must contain your name, and one must also contain your address” — documents such as a bank statements and some private ID card. Most people won’t go to the trouble. It is so much simpler just to carry and show “your papers”.
Most people will think this practice is normal. Perhaps they will believe it has always been like this, a bit like in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where the subjects change their minds about recent history at the signal of the state. In fact, until the late 1990s — just 10 years ago! — you could still find Quebecers who had drivers’ licences and medicare cards without a photograph. Can you imagine? Some peaceful individuals were still living without government-issued photo ID! And until quite recently, it was also received opinion in the Anglo-American world that ID cards were a sign of tyranny. They have since become a mark of belonging.
Before C-31 (and the preceding regulations which put the foot of the state in the door), there was no real problem of voter fraud. The new obligations have been imposed on the basis of ouï-dire and, as Peter Van Loan, government leader in the House of Commons, hinted at, some people begging to be tagged. And there was certainly no worse problem than the continuous fraud the state is committing by removing our liberties while pretending to protect them.
The argument for official ID papers is that they facilitate law enforcement, which is why conservatives are all excited. Any realistic appraisal of the world around us shows that this argument is exactly upside down: it actually runs against ID papers. For which law enforcement are we talking about? Laws against murder and theft were enforced long before official ID papers appeared. And after the state had introduced them, sophisticated criminals and terrorists obtained or falsified them. Nearly all the 9/11 terrorists had proper ID.
The sort of laws that official ID papers help enforce are typically those that should not exist in the first place — those that regulate what people do on their own property (e.g. tobacco police looking for offenders in private restaurants or bars) or with their own body (e.g. riding bicycles without helmets), those that impose permits and licences (e.g. personal licencing for gun owners), and so forth. Just think of what the state is unable to do when it cannot rapidly and reliably identify peaceful individuals. Like a (diminishing) host of procedural and substantive restraints on the state, the absence of official ID papers increases the cost of enforcing laws that delve into people’s private affairs and invade private property. Thus, without official ID papers, such laws are less likely to be adopted. We should know because we lived in a free society a few decades ago.
It is not only conservatives who favour ID papers, but all those who dream of state power and population control. The French ID card was created by the fascist Pétain regime. (It has since been made voluntary but, like we now observe in the U.S. and Canada, official ID papers have become nearly indispensable.) Totalitarian states like China impose compulsory ID cards. Many other examples could be cited.
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