The 1998-99 edition of How Ottawa Spends analyses the federal Liberal government's balancing act as it launches its second mandate. The February 1998 balanced budget was the first since the early 1970s, which leads us into the uncharted waters of post-deficit politics. Will the Liberals beable to stay the budgetary course, or will they succumb to growing pressures to spend the 'fiscal divident'? But the Liberals also face another balancing act: they must walk a line between the policies they pursued in their first mandate--government downsizing, expenditure restraint, program review,and decentralization--and the more activist and centralist policies that tempt them in the second. These issues are explored in essays that cover a wide variety of policy fields: fiscal policy, federalism, trade, labour market strategy, food inspection, performance reporting, immigration and refugeepolicy, defence, the environment, abuse of women and family violence, and gay and lesbian rights.

Leslie A. Pal's profile page

Leslie A. Pal is Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. He earned his BA (Hon) from Mount Allison University and a doctorate from Queen's University (Kingston). He's taught for two years at the University of Waterloo, and for ten years at the University ofCalgary before taking up his current position at Carleton University. He has been a visiting scholar at the J.F.K. Institute for north American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, and lectures throughout North America and Europe. Dr. Pal has served on the national board of the CanadianPolitical Science Association and the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He earned a Canadian Studies Writing Award in 1989 for his book Interests of State: The Politics of Language, Multiculturalism and Feminism in Canada (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), and received a ResearchAchievement Award from Carleton University in 1996.