Letters: Floor-crossers guilty of political breach of trust

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Scott Stinson’s celebration of Ontario’s new park drinking rules might seem trivial. It isn’t. A beer in the park turns out to be a civics lesson in how a society understands freedom, trust, and the proper limits of state power.

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The change in the law maps neatly onto a classic philosophical divide: “negative” freedom versus “positive” freedom. Negative freedom restricts in advance, assuming the worst. It presumes guilt. Positive freedom trusts citizens to act responsibly and reserves the law for actual harm, not anticipated misbehaviour.

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Ontario’s old prohibition was pure negative freedom: don’t drink because you might cause trouble. Never mind that you hadn’t. Never mind that most people wouldn’t. The state positioned itself as the only reliable source of authority.

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That posture — that only the state knows best — had roots. Canada’s drinking laws were long shaped by temperance morality, quietly embedded in civil statute well after the culture moved on. The assumption lingered: that people cannot be trusted with something as ordinary as a beer on a sunny afternoon. Other democracies never shared that moral anxiety and survived just fine.

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The new rules get the burden of proof right. You are presumed innocent. Drink your beer. If you cause harm, the law will get you. That is how a free society is supposed to work.

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Ontario didn’t just change a law. It updated its understanding of citizenship by renegotiating its social contract with Ontarians.

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I’ll drink to that.

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Tony D’Andrea, Toronto

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Kudos to Justice Antonio Skarica

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I was beginning to wonder if there were any judges with integrity and common sense left. The front-page article about Ontario Justice Antonio Skarica, who blasted other members of the judiciary for prioritizing the needs of criminals over those of their victims, has restored my faith.

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I have been calling it our “injustice system” for the past few years. Thank God there is at least one man with courage. My congratulations to Judge Skarica.

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Sybil Fretz, Pickering, Ont.

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Two sides to high-speed rail debate

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Gage Haubrich and Noah Jarvis were right to call out the fairy-tale economics of the proposed high-speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City. The capital stack on high-speed rail has always depended on optimistic ridership models and political patience that rarely survives first contact with reality. That skepticism is earned.

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But there’s a blind spot here; a policy-sized hole where land use, agglomeration effects and induced demand should be doing some heavy lifting. High-speed rail isn’t just a transportation project; it’s a corridor-shaping instrument. Ignore the integration with transit-oriented development, zoning reform, and value capture mechanisms, and of course it looks like a vanity project with a very expensive timetable.

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The real question isn’t whether the trains pay for themselves at the fare box, they almost never do. It’s whether the network effects justify the subsidy. Done properly, with co-ordinated regional planning and disciplined governance, you’re not funding a train; you’re underwriting a spatial economic strategy.