The Donner Canadian Foundation has awarded a grant to the University of Toronto Faculty of Law to establish a centre for rethinking the role of government. Given the growing disenchantment of critics on both the right and the left with the role and performance of governments in mature industrialized democracies, there is an urgent need to address systematically both the question of what government should do, and how it should do it. This imperative is made all the more urgent by large budget deficits and debt burdens and resultant concerns over the effects of increasing tax levels on the scope for private initiative and liberty. Major redefinition and restructuring of the role of the public sector has been an important element in the agendas of many of the governments elected in liberal democracies abroad as well as in Canada. The Centre aspires to be a leading interdisciplinary policy forum principally devoted to the task of rethinking, both the objectives and instruments of government.
Workshops serve a more internal function of providing a forum for review of research in progress.
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