will we look back on vaccine mandates as we do on mandatory seatbelts?
everyone agreed that seatbelts reduced injuries and saved lives. but should the government mandate their use?
5 minute read
vaccine mandates may figuratively become the new seatbelt legislation of our times, writes history professor kyle jantzen.
timothy a. clary/afp via getty images files
by kyle jantzen
i was a junior high school student at swift current’s o.m. irwin school in the late 1970s when the province of saskatchewan introduced its seatbelt law. saskatchewan was the third province to mandate seatbelts, and the 1977 law required drivers, front-seat passengers and children under 16 to buckle up.
the seatbelt law aroused a good deal of controversy across the province, which i remember well, in part because the irwin school debate club decided to take up the topic. the question posed was something like, “should the saskatchewan government require the use of seatbelts?” the yes side went first and presented a lot of data — studies, statistics, charts, and so forth — proving beyond a doubt, it seemed to me, that seatbelts reduced injuries and saved lives.
by the time the yes side finished its opening argument, i felt sorry for the no side that was about to present their case. “poor students,” i thought. “they don’t stand a chance. it’s not even a fair debate question.”
when the no side began, its speakers immediately agreed with everything the yes side had presented! seatbelts surely reduced injuries and saved lives, they concurred. but that was not the debate question. the question, they explained, was whether the saskatchewan government should mandate their use. simply put, should seatbelts be required by law?
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my memory of that moment is that the air left the room. suddenly, everything the yes side had just presented about how well seatbelts worked seemed, well, beside the point. for me, at least, it was a remarkable moment, and one i still remember vividly — no doubt with the embellishment of nostalgia. the balance of the no case in that junior-high seatbelt debate focused, as you might well imagine, on the limits of governmental authority and the importance of individual rights and freedoms.
outside the classroom, and despite the irritation of a good many saskatchewan drivers, the seatbelt law stood. in those days, tickets were $20. over time, province after province enacted similar mandates. alberta was the last to do so, a full decade behind saskatchewan. gradually, seatbelt laws evolved. in time, everyone had to wear a seatbelt, and requirements were added for special car seats for infants and booster seats for young children. and the fines went up too.
unsurprisingly, injuries and deaths from car accidents decreased over time, as seatbelt use increased. but compliance was spotty in the early 1980s. as a teenager, i remember unbuckling so i could lie down in the back seat on road trips with my parents. even as an adult, i would often neglect to buckle up for short trips around town, when i was on my own in the car. these days, that’s almost impossible. my car nags me until i engage my seatbelt. my semi-conscious and token resistance — the residue of growing up in the 1970s — is to put my car in drive and buckle up as the car starts to roll forward.
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but some canadians resisted seatbelt laws more forcefully. in 1987, kim maier, “a bit of a maverick,” challenged alberta’s brand-new seatbelt law by “circling the calgary police station with his seat belt hanging out the door.” then, “he put a sign on his truck announcing his misdeed to the world.” finally, “he took to shouting at passing police cruisers: ‘hey, i’m not wearing a seat belt. give me a ticket.’” on july 5, 1987, after taunting calgary police for eight hours, maier got the ticket he craved.
in court, maier quickly confessed that he was guilty of the law as written, but that was not the point. what he wanted was to challenge the law itself, arguing that the seatbelt mandate was an infringement of “his right to ‘life, liberty, and security of the person’ as guaranteed by section 7 of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms.”
like others — you’ll remember this if you’re old enough — he argued that seatbelts were dangerous, because they could trap drivers in their vehicles, make them slide under the dash in the event of an accident, or pose a danger to pedestrians and cyclists because drivers wearing seatbelts would feel overconfident and drive recklessly at faster speeds. maier called various witnesses who testified along these lines. one even tried to prove that seatbelts didn’t actually reduce injuries or save lives.
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given our long-running experience of seatbelt use, you will not be surprised to learn that the court ruled that “the principle of fundamental justice” had not been violated. moreover, the judge determined that the benefits of seatbelts justified the mandating of their use as “a reasonable limit (to freedom) demonstrably justified in a free and democratic country.” maier appealed and the seatbelt law was temporarily called into question until the alberta court of appeal once more confirmed the original judgment. maier remained steadfast in his anti-seatbelt convictions. his rationale? “i like risk and i think seatbelts reduce my enjoyment of life. i’m doing this so that my kids can enjoy life.” he tried to appeal his case to the supreme court of canada, but the court refused to consider the case.
today, we’re engaged in a similar debate about covid-19 vaccines, which are the product of an unprecedented emergency global research collaboration. their development and approval have been marked by abundant funding, extensive testing, and a top-priority-no-red-tape path through a normally bureaucratic regulatory process.
while some still argue that vaccines are ineffective, unsafe or worse, other canadians express concern over the role of the government in requiring vaccines through a vaccine mandate (in alberta, the “restrictions exemption program”) and a vaccine passport (in alberta, the “card-sized vaccination record”). i have no doubt there will be court challenges to vaccine mandates across canada, based on constitutional grounds. i expect they will fail, in much the same way as kim maier’s seatbelt case failed in the 1980s and 1990s.
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what is both more important and more hopeful, i would argue, is the way in which the government legislation of seatbelt use changed our views — our culture — over time. few today would argue that seatbelt laws are controversial. more than that, our attitudes have evolved. today, most of us would gasp if we saw a family driving down the freeway with a parent sitting in the front seat holding an infant on their lap — neither with any restraint holding them in — even though many of us grew up that way.
and while historians like me generally avoid predictions about the future — we know that life rarely unfolds quite the way we expect it to — we do seek to learn lessons from the past that will help us in our present lives. considering the history of seatbelt legislation, then, i think it’s reasonably likely that, a decade or two from now, we will look back in wonderment over both the vaccine hesitancy of some canadians and the angry protests of a smaller anti-vaccination faction. and tragically, as with seatbelts, some among us will carry the lifelong pain of family members lost to needless death.
kyle jantzen is dean of arts and science and professor of history at ambrose university in calgary. he lives in high river.
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