What will Canada look like if tens of thousands of public sector jobs are lost by the end of this year? That is the question plaguing economists, unions and political analysts alike. These potential job losses follow the federal Conservative government’s announcement to freeze wages and deliver $8 billion in cuts over the next five years.

Politics at the national level has always been a zero sum game; yet it would seem that increasingly the consequences are especially swift for advisors and consultants who find themselves at the wrong end of a comment which could prove damaging to a re-election campaign.

In 1930, the United States Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, a “beggar thy neighbor” protectionist economic policy that would initiate the world’s first global trade war. Today, eighty-two years later, the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme would seem to suggest that the protectionist urge still lives on.