From freedom to freeloading: welfare, crime, divorce, abortiom, dependency and taxation have all surged under federal management.

Report, The, March, 2003 by Stock, Peter

Ananonymous wag once quipped that sometime in the 1960s Canadians went from being "hewers of wood and drawers of water" to "doers of good and drawers of welfare." Clever, and lamentably true.

In the two decades following the Second World War, Canadians began to define security less in terms of family, hard work, community, Christian charity and a place in the British Empire, and more in terms of government programs and personal lifestyles. At the same time, government--especially federal government--was transformed from something distant to which you owed a duty, into something omnipresent that comforted, cured and supported you.

David Murrell, an economics professor at the University of New Brunswick, says, "Government expenditures took a big leap...