Editor:
One thing I learned as a parent was that you’d better not ever make a rule that you weren’t prepared to enforce – because, if you did make such a rule, and subsequently failed to enforce it, that sequence of events not only made that particular rule an irrelevance, but also made every single other rule you’d ever made (or would ever make) unenforceable also.
What child or teen would ever take the rule about not diving off that dangerous cliff seriously, if the rule about not swimming in the too-swift river hadn’t been enforced? Yes, it’s a silly example, but an even sillier one is our current council’s decision to enact a ban on idling cars.
They know it’s unenforceable, and yet they enacted it anyway, “to signal the community’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
When you make an unenforceable rule, what you are telling people has nothing to do with what a good citizen you are, trying to fight against greenhouse gases, and everything to do with what a chump you are, making an unenforceable rule and then ignoring people’s offences against it as a limp way of indicating your (sort-of) support for a goal that you know you can’t really achieve.
Sad to think that people actually sat around a table and discussed this, and then enacted it, without realizing that what they’d done would be an utter waste of time. Even sadder to think that they weren’t capable of extrapolating that to understand that this would undermine the weight of their seriousness about issues on which they could possibly have an effect, like safe streets, good garbage handling, rational traffic flow, etc.
I am, at the very least, seriously disappointed in this nonsense.
Caroline Yull,
Canmore
