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.