When Susan Holt, Premier of New Brunswick, explained why New Brunswickers couldn’t go for a walk in the woods, she probably thought she was being reasonable. After all, she was talking about safety, and who could be against safety? Her tone was casual, a little hesitant, almost folksy, as if she were explaining to a neighbour why they shouldn’t light a campfire in a dry summer. But the words — stripped of their verbal padding — revealed a dangerous and growing habit among the technocratic political class: the idea that the state may suspend your liberty not because of something you’ve done, or even something you’re likely to do, but because you might, in some small way, inconvenience the machinery of government.
This was not a policy Holt invented in isolation. The initial reflex came from Tim Houston, the alleged conservative Premier of Nova Scotia, who moved first to ban activity in the woods under the guise of wildfire safety. Holt followed his lead but offered her justification when people pushed back.
Here is Holt in her own words:
Me going for a walk in the woods is gonna cause a fire. I can understand why people, uh, think that that’s, that’s. That’s ridiculous. But the reality is, it’s not that you might cause a fire, it’s that if you’re out there walking in the woods and you break your leg, we’re not gonna come and get you because we have emergency responders that are out focused on a fire that is, uh, threatening the lives of New Brunswickers.
And if you take your boat out fishing in a pond and crown land and you capsize, we’re not gonna be able to come and help you out because our first responders are focused on an immediate and serious threat to our province, and so it’s the possibility of diverting emergency resources away from where they are really needed.
She begins by acknowledging the obvious — that banning walks in the woods on the grounds of preventing fires is ridiculous — only to pivot into something stranger. The ban, she admits, is not about fires at all. It is about the possibility that you might get hurt in a way that would require emergency services, at a moment when those services are otherwise engaged.
In other words, the basic freedom of movement can be revoked, not because you are engaging in dangerous behaviour, but because you might someday need state assistance when the state is busy doing something else.
It is not a fire safety policy. It is a triage policy, enforced by preemptively removing the public from situations that could “possibly” create emergencies instead of prioritizing the situations. It treats liberty not as a default, but as a state-rationed privilege — something to be issued or withheld according to the administrative convenience of the government.
It is also an echo, almost note-for-note, of the logic that governed our pandemic restrictions.
During COVID, the danger that justified curtailing your movement was rarely that you, specifically, were sick or a risk to others. It was that you might be, and that your potential illness might lead to hospital visits, and that those visits might — in the statistical aggregate — put strain on the health system. “Flatten the curve” was never about eliminating disease; it was about protecting state capacity. The emphasis, repeated endlessly, was on the system’s needs, not yours. People were sacrificed to protect a decaying system, instead of fixing the system.
Tim Houston and Susan Holt’s “no walk in the woods” decrees offer the same logic in a new key. The danger is not that you will start a fire, or even that you will injure yourself, but that you could, and that this hypothetical injury could burden a service currently occupied. The safety measure is not a fire ban or rescue warning, but rather the forced cessation of activities to avoid the possibility (not the probability) of creating a demand for state response.
It is worth pausing to spell out the underlying assumptions.
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