Dalton McGuinty keeps churning out more laws to protect residents than any previous Ontario premier, but some do not do their job well and others raise the question why he took so long.

The latest very much in the latter category is a ban on motorists using hand-held cell phones while driving, except to call 911 in an emergency, which the Liberal premier says will come into effect Oct. 26.

The premier's road to this has been painfully slow, almost total gridlock. The Liberals began mulling banning motorists' use of cell phones in the mid-1990s.

This was when cell phones became omnipresent and a nuisance on streets and in stores, restaurants, buses and trains, and a danger in cars, because they distract drivers from focusing on the roads.

Some Liberals had kind words for a Progressive Conservative backbencher, John O'Toole, in the late 1990s, when he introduced a private member's bill to ban cell phones while driving.

O'Toole could not persuade his party, then in government, to support him, because Conservatives particularly have tended to see a man's car as his castle.

Examples include a Conservative government being reluctant to force vehicle occupants to buckle seat belts until it was reduced to a minority in the 1970s and a later Conservative premier, Mike Harris, scrapping photo radar, in which police checked drivers' speeds from unmarked cars, which a New Democrat government had brought in to reduce speeding and accidents.

The Liberals under McGuinty have been in government for six years and say they have been delayed by wanting to fine-tune their legislation.

But this law has had more experts looking under the hood than a new model Rolls Royce. Research has shown drivers using hand-held cell phones are four times more likely to be in a crash than drivers who focus totally on the road.

Police, road safety organizations and the insurance industry have long supported a ban on using the handheld phones while driving.

But politicians generally are reluctant to get between residents and their cars and McGuinty is increasingly wary of introducing legislation that encourages the Conservatives to accuse him of creating a "nanny state."

In the debate on the cell-phone law, one Tory, Peter Shurman, complained that it put the province on the slippery slope to nanny-statism and another, Ted Chudleigh, charged the Liberals want to ban residents from doing everything of which Liberals disapprove. A far-right Toronto newspaper also labeled the premier Gauleiter McGuinty.

This may be a reason McGuinty is hesitating to bring in other laws to protect residents whose desirability has been well proven. One would require adult cyclists, not just those under 18, to wear helmets.

Three times in recent years, MPPs of all parties have approved private members' bills and motions requiring cyclists of all ages to wear helmets.

The New Democrats in government approved such a law in the early 1990s and even set a starting date, but Conservatives who defeated them changed it to apply only to under-18s.

As a backbencher, John Milloy, now a Liberal minister, obtained support for a private member's bill requiring all cyclists to wear helmets, after MPPs of all parties told poignant stories of adult relatives and friends killed or injured because they were not wearing helmets.

Several municipalities also have called on the province to require adult cyclists to wear helmets, but none of this has thus far prompted McGuinty to act.

After a 13-year-old boy was killed when he fell and hit his head on a tree while skiing, McGuinty said he quickly bought a ski helmet and started wearing it.

The premier urged all skiers to wear helmets, but his government has made no move to make them compulsory.

The Canadian Cancer Society, Health Canada and Liberal and New Democrat MPPs have called tanning beds that many use to give them a healthy-looking glow an extreme danger and urged restrictions, but McGuinty has not acted.

This is a premier keen to protect people, but increasingly concerned about protecting himself.