With his public choice theory, Nobel laureate James Buchanan pointed out how public interest groups, including public servants, end up working for themselves at the expense of the public. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long fulfilled this prediction. In fact, in 1980 blue ribbon panel concluded that the EPA's work was rife with what become known as junk science: a habit of selectively citing data designed to support preconceived and self-serving ambitions and policy goals.

If the Nisga'a Final Agreement is the template for the 50 or more land-claim agreements or treaties yet to be negotiated in BC as Premier Glen Clark says it is, then at the end of the exercise, British Columbians will wake up to discover that their federal and provincial governments will have substantially altered forever the economic, social, and political fabric of their province.

When the conference How to Spend the Fiscal Dividend: What is the Optimal Size of Government? was planned in the summer of 1997, the Government of Canada was expected to present a balanced budget in the upcoming fiscal year 1998/99 and, if tax rates and spending programs remained unchanged, large annual surpluses in the following years. These expected surpluses have become known as the fiscal dividend because they are the return on the investment of fiscal restraint practised since 1993.