SACPA: Exploring the role of government with Paul Hinman

(Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs on YouTube)

Hinman said, “for me, there’s no question that the very reason and purpose of government is because of the people and the individual.”

“You look around the world and basically we’re organized into countries around the world and places, I guess I want to say very remote areas…some of those places don’t really know or recognize what country they live in, but they belong to a tribe then and they have communal living and they set up their rules, their laws and they abide by it. They usually have someone at the top of that system that is there to aid the governance.”

Hinman believes first and foremost, the role of government is to protect the people they serve.

“We protect the lives of those individuals, we protect the freedoms of those individuals and we protect the property of those individuals, and their pursuit of happiness.”

He said when you look at the individual, people have the “right to defend their life, they have the right to defend their property and they have the right to defend their freedom and their pursuit of happiness.”

“Because we have that right, we actually have the right to use force and this is the problem in the world – is because force or power, again the old saying, ‘you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’ and so, with that force that we as individuals have to protect ourselves, we can come together collectively and say, well this is really tough having to worry and protect our property all the time and so what we’d like to do, let’s get together and let’s hire that tough individual over there who’s really good at it…and we can go back to doing our farming and look after our cattle and do all those things.”

Hinman stated that something strange happens when power starts “to be collected”.

“There’s often this idea that when this individual or source of power, whether it’s the government, the cabinet, now says well no, we actually have this right because what we’re going to do is that we think this business or this group of people is wrong and we’re not going to allow them to exist or practice what they want to do.”

He then asked where the rights of individuals end.

“I’ve always said that our individual rights end when it hurts another individual, for example physically.”

“We have the right to move about do and carry on our business but we don’t have the right to – someone that we’re competing with – to go over and pummel and beat up and say, you know, we don’t want you competing with us anymore, you need to get out of town.”

Nominations for the leadership of the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta opened on April 2 and will close on May 14, with a two-week vetting period ongoing until May 31.

The leadership race will take place from June 5 to August 27, with a new leader set to be voted in on Saturday, August 28, 2021.

by Justin Goulet

SACPA: Exploring the role of government with Paul Hinman

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