Since the Second World War, the U.S. economy has been built around what you might call the fear sector: its military-industrial complex, its crime-prison complex and its homeland-terror complex. We're now seeing the first attempt by a Canadian government to follow this model.

In the U.S., the military portion has been the healthiest (economically speaking). It made weapons the government could sell abroad and employed a work force with unions that were able to bargain medical and other insurance, taking pressure off governments to provide those. Its budget is 43 per cent of what the rest of the world spends militarily and as high in the Obama era as before.