GOT MILK JUSTICE ?

This article from the National Post was provided to us by our friends at the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

We highlighted the case Michael Schmidt some time ago as a perfect example of government health officials being too powerful, (and obviously not busy enough) for our own good. Read about it here, here and here

At C.A.G.E., we sincerely admire Michael Schmidt for standing up and fighting for what he believes in, and we appreciate the efforts demonstrated by Justice Paul Kowarsky in delivering such a well-researched judgment.

We once again elaborate that what the public needs most, and what would be best for a free and enlightened society is more transparency, accountability, full and truthful labeling of products, and free market choice, and much less government bans and across the board restrictions.

Let people inform themselves, let them take responsibility for their actions, and do not force them to do or not to do anything that someone else decides is good or bad or risky or too much fun. A nanny-state with powerful health-care bureaucrats whose dictates are enforced by statutory and even penal laws is not conducive to a free and enlightened society, and is not the sort of Canada that we wish to live in.

Karen Selick: Got milk justice?

MORE ON THE RAW MILK CONTROVERSY

Please refer to our previous articles about Mr. Schmidt's fight with Ontario health officials on his right to sell raw milk to a group of people that prefer it to pasteurized milk.

CTV reports a conference on the merits of raw milk which Health Canada officials deny. They claim that any possible benefits are far outweighed by the serious risk for illness.

Here's a novel notion for Health Canada and its bureaucrats: How about letting each adult consumer decide for themselves what risks they are willing to take for what they ingest? Who is best suited to decide which benefits outweigh which risks but the informed consumer himself? It's not as if Mr. Schmidt force feeds his customers with the milk. Unless these raw milk proponents have been totally shut off from all sources of information about raw milk's health risks for the last few decades, they are adults and in a free society they should be entitled to make their own decisions about their own body and health.

Conference touts raw milk's health benefits

''CAN I DECIDE FOR MYSELF WHAT IS GOOD FOR ME OR DOES THE GOVERNMENT HAVE TO DECIDE THAT?'' Michael Schmidt

On May 19, 2008 we posted a comment about the underground milk market and Mr. Michael Schmidt who defies an umpteenth healthist law in Canada by supplying raw milk to a select customer base.

Canwest has published a follow-up article on this story that motivates us to once again congratulate Mr. Schmidt who is willing to go a long way to defend his principles which very much resemble those of C.A.G.E. ‘’Can I decide for myself what is good for me or does the government have to decide that?" is the basis for Mr. Schmidt’s defiance and the lengths he will go to in order to defend his right to self-autonomy.

Once again public health uses the ‘’for the children’’ classical excuse to justify their intransigence. According to what we learn from the article, Canada is the only G8 country with an outright ban on the sale of raw milk. Oh what lengths our healthist government will go to to protect our children while our public hospitals are infested with c-difficile and thousands of people young and old die yearly from medical errors while none of Mr. Schmidt’s customers ever got sick! Which begs the question: What stops bureaucrats from regularly verifying if the raw milk sold in some dedicated farms is safe for human consumption instead of once again taking the easy way out and outright banning it thus removing all choice? It has become more than insulting to undermine adult intelligence and parental judgment to this point. It is in fact beginning to be very frightening. Will they eventually remove children from their biological parents to raise them in sterilized state camps until they are deemed of legal age to protect themselves from their parents? If the tendency doesn’t get reversed somehow, we are afraid that this scenario is really not that farfetched. Let's not forget that parental abuse and neglect laws do exist for those unfortunate children that do indeed have irresponsible parents. If they can prove raw milk is actually harming a particular child but the parents insist they drink it, they can easily enforce these already existent laws.

If you would like to address letters of encouragement or a donation to Mr. Schmidt’s defense fund you can do so via his website at: http://www.glencoltonfarms.com/

Raw milk: what's the risk?

THE UNDERGROUND MILK MARKET

Whether you drink milk or not, whether you believe milk is the root of all evil or on the contrary the solution to every health problem, whether you drink your milk skimmed, partially skimmed or whole, that choice should be yours and yours alone.

Pasteurization of milk has been the norm for way too long for most of us to remember what raw milk right from the cow teats tastes like or any of its virtues. Pasteurization has been the law in Canada for too long for most of us to stop and reflect that forbidding us from drinking it raw infringes on our personal freedoms.

There are some people who believe strongly in the virtues of raw milk and will go to great lengths to get it and some farmers are only too happy to oblige. One of those farmers is Mr. Michael Schmidt who operates an organic farm in Grey-Bruce County near Owen Sound in Ontario.

As you can read from the Star article below, Mr. Schmidt has found a loophole to go around the law and has been doing it for many years and despite the warnings, he does not intend to give in to the Health Units who demand that he cleans his act. Indeed, the health unit has met heroic resistance from Mr. Schmidt who believes that individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions for what they put in their body. "I have deep respect for the freedom and rights of individuals," he says when asked why he is prepared to risk everything to defend raw milk. "That is the foundation of a just society."

Kudos to Mr. Schmidt for his determination! We only wish that there were more Schmidts around to make a stand for themselves and the rest of us through their courageous and principled actions.

Read article in the Star : Raw versus the law