Health Canada wields a powerful rod and is ready to spank anyone that disagrees with her values.
In another case of “let’s regulate and ban,” Health Canada, that wonderful beurocracy that claims to be looking out for the ‘health’ of Canadians, has decided to punish good parents that understand inanimate objects in of themselves, are not harmful.
A total ban on baby walkers has been introduced – and what this means, you will not even be able to sell your used baby walker to a neighbour at a garage sale without breaking the law.
It’s pathetic really. As Pierre Lemieux pointed out in his speech in Marmora on March 29th, Health Canada has become a regime that “does not want people to make their own choices” in relation to health.
According to this Toronto Star article, Canada bans sale of new, used baby walkers, “seven per cent of pediatricians had treated at least one walker-related injury in the previous year.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but that seems like an awfully low figure to me. Assuming that pediatricians in Canada do in fact treat mostly babies, there must be quite a few pediatricians in Canada. And if only 7% of them treated an injury sustained by the use of a baby walker once per year, that suggests that there aren’t that many babies percentage wise being injured through the use of a babywalker.
Baby walkers have a special place in my life. One of my mother’s favorite stories is about how I “ran away from home” in a baby walker when I was less than a year old. I travelled apparently some miles in this thing, enjoying my little adventure before I was found.
Could something bad have happened to me? I suppose so. Life is like that. Death or injury is part of life – and it terrifies me at times to think that I might die someday. I don’t like to think about it. But the fact of the matter is, we all will. Whether it will be an early death from an accident or illness, or we’re to be so lucky to live to a ripe old age.
According to this article at Safe Kids Canada, “It is estimated that 12% to 40% of infants placed in baby walkers experience injuries related to the use of walkers.”
What kind of ludicrous statistic is that? Between 12 and 40 percent?
I could swear that the Toronto Star has changed the original article it had on their website, with the original stating that one death per year is attributed to the use of baby walkers. That comment is no longer in the article (in fact, the article seems to have changed quite a bit since I first clicked on it).
I tried to do some quick research on baby walker deaths in Canada after reading the comment, but interestingly, information on this is non-existent other than a couple of articles that indicate death could be a result of the use of baby walkers.
However, I did discover an interesting statistic, that over 60% of baby walker related injuries are the result of baby in walker falling down stairs.
To put a total ban on the use of baby walkers because some parents don’t bother to block off stairs seems absurd to me. Obviously, it’s not the baby walker that is dangerous to the baby here. You may as well just ban stairs to prevent injuries to babies.
It would be interesting to discover what percent of baby injuries are related to stairs. But let’s not give Health Canada any more ideas than they already to further fuel their need to ban, regulate, punish, and continue with their hard assed maternal duties to their citizen children.
As Lemieux pointed out further in his speech, Nazi Germany ran a most efficient national health care system. Although in this day and age, comparisons to Nazis are considered politically incorrect, it’s very difficult to not see the similarities between the Nazis of the 1930’s and Health Canada’s policies. The only difference is in degree.
The government will never ban stairs. No, that would be too radical. It would, however, quite happily create a stair registry. Wouldn’t we all be safer if all staircases with more than, say, three steps or so were registered with a bureaucratic agency?