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In this volume 4 of the
Canada Strong and Free
series, Fraser Institute Senior Fellows Preston Manning and Mike
Harris lay out the case for Canadians to achieve the highest
level of economic freedom and prosperity in the world.
Rebalancing: The Key to Prosperity
The key to a dramatic improvement in the national economy is to
strike a new balance between our individual freedom to make our
own economic decisions and the limits governments place on our
choices. The new balance must restrain the hand of government in
order to unleash what has been identified empirically as the
single most significant contributor to enhanced prosperity:
Canadians' economic freedom.
The balance between the government and private sector
Canada's public sector is too large in proportion to our
wealth-producing private sector. Manning and Harris propose a new
target ratio between the size of our public and private sectors,
one scaled to liberate Canadians' innate ability to enhance our
prosperity.
The balance of taxation and government spending
Manning and Harris propose a measured program of tax reduction
and reform designed to leave substantially more wealth in the
hands of Canadians. They show how this can be done so as to
increase, rather than decrease, the sustainability of essential
social services that governments provide.
The balance of free trade and regulation
The federal government has failed to protect Canadians' rights to
trade freely with each other wherever in our federation they may
live. Provinces defend barriers to trade that protect powerful
special interests at the expense of all Canadians-including their
own citizens. This constitutes yet another imbalance in need of
redress if Canadians are to achieve the prosperity to which we
aspire.
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