Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ecicrl!eci386!jmm
From: jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald)
Newsgroups: ont.general
Subject: Re: Sunday shopping
Message-ID: <1989Dec21.174833.553@eci386.uucp>
Date: 21 Dec 89 17:48:33 GMT
References: <656@crk56.bnr.ca> <1989Dec20.122639.1563@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: jmm@eci386.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Distribution: ont
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates: Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 51

In article <1989Dec20.122639.1563@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> jdd@db.toronto.edu (John DiMarco) writes:
 [ ... ]
> And then there's the religious factor. The predominant religion in Canada
> is Christianity, which holds (for the most part) Sunday as a day of rest.
> Keeping Sunday a day in which most people do not work seems to be the best
> way of accomodating the most people.

Without having any official statistics to back it up, my guess is that the
predominant religion is now Agnostic (with a family tradition and some partial
observance level of some Christian variation).

Note: Agnostic is NOT the same as Atheist!
	Agnostic: no absolute beliefs regarding God
	Atheist: absolute belief that there is no God

Certainly, there is a clear majority of people who do not belief that Sunday
is a holy day that should not be tainted by commercial enterprise.

There is also a strong concern that families should be able to share a day
of non-work in common.

It is by no means clear that enforcing non-working on Sunday for all people
is the appropriate way of accomodating the desire of such families however.
It certainly "solves" the problem in circumstances in which there is no
problem - single people, couples with only one person working and no children
in school, people who have Saturday as their "Holy Day", people who could
work part-time on Sundays when their partner is home with the children, ...

Like many laws in our society, it makes far more things illegal than just
those things that the law is trying to prevent.

There are alternatives.  One is to try and solve the problem through means
other than legislation.  Another to use legislation that only prevents the
actual problem.  However, such legislation is much more difficult to specify
- it has many special cases and loopholes, etc. and must be changed often
until it converges on a fair implementation.  Another alternative is to
specify a law that is between the two extemes of clarity and fairness,
using a law that is perhaps a bit more complicated to specify but has far
fewer places where it is unfairly restricting activites that are outside
the scope of the problem that is being solved.  (This middle course can
be an initial step in the iterative convergence towards a fair law.)

The problem with all of this is that both sides are right.  People DO want
to be able to shop on Sunday.  Retailers DO want to be able to open on
Sundays.  If they are allowed to, then workers in the retail sector WILL
have difficulty avoiding working on Sunday, and those that wish to not
work Sunday WILL be somewhat limited in their choices for employment.
-- 
80386 - hardware demonstrating the fractal nature of warts.   | John Macdonald
EMS/LIM - software demonstrating the fractal nature of warts. |   jmm@eci386