It’s absolutely remarkable how different the party costing plans are for new spending… plus how absolutely massive the Liberals’ Canada Child Benefit and the Greens’ Carbon Dividend is.

And to follow up the previous post, here are the different budget balances compared on the same chart. The Greens sure are optimistic.

Here’s a comparison of the different party budget balances from their costing plans. They’re all very optimistic about 2020.

Looking back at yesterday’s post, I noticed that the NDP flyer I received also argued that the Conservatives have run 8 deficits. Apparently nobody has time to print new flyers, even when they’re wrong. But how did both the NDP and the Liberals get it wrong? There’s partisanship, obviously. Yet given Canada’s recent economic troubles with the fall in oil prices, a deficit doesn’t seem that crazy. Time for another budget post!

Today, this flyer arrived in my mailbox from the Liberal party in Burnaby North – Seymour for Terry Beech:

This year has marked a record turnout in the advance polls, with over 3.6 million voters casting their ballot over the past weekend. Advance polling has grown steadily in popularity over the years, in spite of the otherwise languid voting turnout in Canada since the 1990s. At this rate I wonder if we will eventually have a voting week rather than election day.

…but while we may be receiving more refugees from the Africa and the Middle East, the total number of refugees has declined over the past decade. Africa and the Middle East has increased in share mainly because the number of refugees from there has remained constant.

If Canada isn’t taking in refugees from Syria, where are we taking them in from? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t easy to find. Citizenship and Immigration aggregates refugees’ origin into regions, rather than by specific countries.

In what may be the last (no promises, though) in my series of budget charts, I show the federal budgets and the party that passed them.

Whoops. Budget week (and this blog) got severely knocked off course, because I was knocked off my bike a couple weeks ago. I’m healed up, and back to the intense work of sitting down at my computer – it’s hard to sit down when bending your knee hurts.