Ontario's egregious helmet law, requiring every cyclist in the province, adult or child, to wear a helmet (with "chin strap securely fastened"), is a small but precious jewel of such moral nonsense, a perfect example of the sort of interfering enthusiasm that seems to afflict politicians of all parties. If there were ever any hope that Ontario's new provincial government might find the will to curb this nannying reflex, it has now been lost. Indeed, if the Tories cannot bring themselves to relieve the state of such an eccentric interpretation of its role, what can they do?

But there was Mike Harris, announcing that the law would take effect as planned, Oct. 1. No, he didn't favour making helmets mandatory himself. But darn it if the idea wasn't so sensible that everyone really ought to wear one anyway. "I ride a bike and I wear a helmet," the Premier chirped, "as does my wife and sons." I'll just bet they do. They probably go out riding together.

Human beings find the most extraordinary variety of ways to kill themselves. It's like some vast and catastrophic steeplechase: some of us falling at the first turn, sucked into a piece of farm machinery at an early age, and others advancing to the far stretch, only to choke on a piece of parsley, but none of us quite making it to the finish line.

And of all the many and horrible ways there are to go, death by bicycle is surely one of the most difficult. Elsewhere I have shown that, at an average of 26 fatal head injuries annually, scarcely one in 100,000 of Ontario's 2.5 million cyclists manages the trick every year. On conservative estimates of distance pedalled per annum, this works out to one head-injury death for every 14 million or so cyclist- kilometres.

Another way of putting it is to note that the risk of caving in his skull reduces a cyclist's life expectancy by a grand total of about five hours. It is plausible to think that the health benefits of riding a bike even once a week would lengthen the same cyclist's life expectancy by many multiples of that. Given the experience in Australia, one of only two other places in the world to have enacted such a law - where according to one study, "the greatest effect of the helmet law was not to encourage cyclists to wear helmets, but to discourage cycling," to the tune of a 25- per-cent decline - the net impact on life expectancies may well be negative.

None of these considerations was much taken into account back in 1993 when Ontario's legislation was passed. The quality of the debate may be gleaned from the following exchange in Hansard:

Mr. Lessard: I think it is important for cyclists to know that when out on their bicycle anything can happen. I can tell members about a personal experience that happened to me. When I was riding my bicycle one day with my wife, I happened to be assaulted.

An hon. member: By your wife?

Mr. Lessard: Not my wife. I was assaulted by an inconsiderate motorist who actually ended up spending 20 days in jail as a result, but I did fall on my head. Luckily I was wearing a helmet and was prevented from injury.

There you have it: Wear your helmet, in case someone assaults you. Another member volunteered a quotation from an eminent cycling authority to the effect that he would not move "two feet" on a bicycle without his helmet. This is not evidence of his eminence. It is evidence of neurosis, a morbid obsession with risk out of all proportion to its reality.

That is what is really objectionable in all this: It's not the law, really; it's the helmets, and all they stand for. It is the wholesale modern conversion of activities in which people have been safely and pleasurably engaging for generations, if not millennia, from sun-bathing to sex, into peril-strewn adventures, not to be undertaken without full body armour. So paralytic has this obsession become that I'm convinced it's not even about safety any more. It's about immortality. Somewhere at the back of the neurotic mind lies the belief that, if I wear a helmet and a condom and enough layers of sun-screen, I'm never going to die.

I would not, perhaps, go so far as to ban helmets on cyclists. If people wish to wear one, surely that is their right. But it is a sad way to carry on, for a nation born of the voyageurs and Vimy Ridge.