Who was Barbara Mitchell?

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This volume presents papers selected from those given at the Fraser Institute's Conference The Privatization of Correctional Services held in Toronto, July 10-11, 1996. The process of privatizing correctional facilities and functions has been taking place in a number of countries for the past 20 years and, although in Canada some aspects of service provision are already performed by the private sector, privatization of major prison services is just beginning. As in other areas of this sort, the services provided by government are not synonymous with services being produced by government.

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More than a decade ago, Michael Walker, the Executive Director of The Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada, and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman organized a series of conferences with the objective of clearly defining and measuring economic freedom. They were able to attract some of the world's leading economists including Gary Becker, Douglass North, Peter Bauer, and Assar Lindbeck to participate in the series and provide input for the study.

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The Canadian Government is being forced by large budget deficits and public debt to be more fiscally responsible. Governments have two ways to spend: they can extract money through taxation and spend it directly, or they can order individuals and firms to spend their own resources in order to achieve the government's goals. This latter route is called regulation.

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This year's survey results show that more Canadians were waiting to receive medical treatment in 1996 than in 1995. According to the study, 172,766 Canadians were waiting for surgical procedures, an increase from 1995's (updated) estimate of 155,969.

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In the debate over global warming, the relevant economic concern is to weigh the costs of taking action against the costs of doing nothing. As global warming is a theory and not a fact, doing nothing about it might indeed be costless. But, even if global warming is occurring, many scientists agree that delaying action by 15 to 25 years would not impose serious additional costs. Furthermore, the costs of any global warming that might be occurring (whether the result of human activities or not) are likely to be exaggerated. Several of the authors in this book show that there may be benefits from warming.

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The purpose of this paper is to take the opportunity offered by the Alberta experience with liquor retailing privatization to examine the sort of market structure and its characteristics that are produced by market forces under privatization and to compare these with the market structure and characteristics of the government-owned system. The impact of government-imposed restrictions on the evolution of an efficient retail distribution system under privatization is also assessed.

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Government-sponsored training programs are increasingly being seen as a panacea for improving prospects in the workplace for disadvantaged workers. In Canada, federal and provincial governments have already embarked on such programs and are poised to invest more money.

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