Toronto Star - Governments are shrinking. Who will do the bailing out?

Throughout the West a bare-knuckle battle is shaping up between the forces of the public and private sectors and their political defenders. Some fear it's a battle that will attack the heart of democracy, and the social contract that is its backbone.

"When you look at Canada and the U.S., it isn't that government is getting smaller, but it's doing different things," says economics professor Thomas Naylor of McGill University. "Instead of redistributing income from the wealthy to the poorer groups, it does the reverse."