Guelph Predictions....

Mayor: Karen Farbridge.

Ward 1: Bob Bell & Sean Farrelly

Ward 2: Ian Findlay & Ray Ferraro

Ward 3: June Hofland & Maggie Laidlaw

Ward 4: Gloria Kovach & Cam Guthrie

Ward 5: Lise Burcher & Leanne Piper

Ward 6: Karl Wettstein & Todd Dennis

Socialist Harper

Mike Brock is deservedly angry. Stephen Harper's Tories have vastly increased the size of government. Trudeau would be no doubt approve.

Except that not everything is quite as bad as Mike believes.

Clocking in at an impressive $55.6 billion, the Harper government has single-handedly managed to inflate the size of the Federal government since taking office in 2006, by approximately 50%.

I don't mean to nitpick, but that number seems wrong to me. The Federal Budget since 2006 has run in the 200 to 300 billion dollar range. Actually, based on the numbers I have the federal spending ran at 223 billion in 2006. The last numbers I saw for projections of 2009 to 2010 fiscal year was 271.4 billion (based on a 54.8 billion dollar deficit). So really this increase is closer to 22 %. Still bad. Just not THAT bad.

The next thing that should let Mike's blood pressure drop a bit (or raise it) is comparing Stephen Harper's new found spend crazy ways to those of US President Obama.

Harper's 56 billion dollar deficit equates to about 3.7% of our GDP.

Obama's 1.6 trillion dollar deficit equates to 11% of their GDP.  That's almost 3 times bigger comparatively.

Also Trudea's increases in spending over his tenure works out to 69% in his first stint, followed by 12% in his second.