Crowds of Canadians cheered President Obama on his state visit to Canada last month. Mysterious, given this is the guy who is plunging our closest neighbour and biggest trading partner into the biggest spending deceit on this continent in our lifetime.

The fallout of Obama’s $1.2 trillion spending bill, which some analysts say could double or triple in actual costs, is certain to affect Canada. We are bound to suffer from renewed American socialism, protectionism and economic stagflation. We’re neighbours to the guy who just dug a huge hole in his yard that his house might fall into. We’ll be effected everyday until he fixes the problem. In the near future, the Canadian dollar is likely to get stronger, making our exports more expensive to our American cousins. More than 75 per cent of our exports go to the United States. Time to discount prices.

A telling moment for me happened last month in the U.S. Congress when Ohio Republican John Boehner held up a stack of paper so thick he needed two hands to hold it. Boehner said that it was the epitome of government spending that his children and their grandchildren would have to pay back. "There are 1,100 pages and not one member of this body has read this. Not one," he said. "What happened to the promise that we’re going to let the American people see what’s in this bill for 48 hours? But no. We don’t have time to do that."

When he dropped the spending bill to the floor, you could hear the thud. My heart sank with it. I sensed my fears coming true.

Not one Republican on that day voted for the spending bill – Republicans weren’t even allowed in on the committees to discuss it. The bill included a number of ideas that have nothing to do with jobs but much to do with liberal Democrats’ pet projects like $350 million for teaching teens about how to use condoms.

Even the chief tax writer, the U.S. chairman of the Ways and Means committee, New York Democrat Charlie Rangel, told his committee: "I don’t fully understand what the $700 billion is going to do." He’s in charge of what’s in it and he doesn’t know what’s in it or how much. He added: "I’m not saying this is going to work but at least we all feel that as legislators and as Americans we feel that we are doing something."

When anyone offers to fix a problem without details I almost always prefer they do nothing. I don’t know about you but I get nervous if a contractor quotes on a $200 repair job around the house without putting details on paper. I want to know what kind of material he’s going to use and when he’s going to do it and I usually don’t pay up front. It’s not $800 billion or more than $1 trillion when you add the tax. That’s a tax burden of $6,500 for every living person in the United States.

But the U.S. government is now going to spend $1 trillion and doesn’t even have a plan of how it’s going to be spent it all. No one says: "Here’s $1,000. Now, go build me a deck in the yard." But $1 trillion?

What is $1 trillion anyway? Does anybody know? I don’t know anyone who thinks in terms of trillions. I have a hard time visualizing $1 billion. But $1 trillion is equal to $1,000 billion or $1 million million. I can figure out $1 million because I’ve imagined winning it in a lottery. I can build a nice dairy barn for $1 million. $1 trillion will build me one million dairy barns, about 980,000 more dairy barns than there are in Canada. I can’t visualize that many dairy barns other than to imagine it’s dairy barn next to dairy barn on all sides of me and as far as the eye can see, even if I’m standing in the Lanark Highlands looking down. And then add more dairy barns.

The money for this whacko spending bill is so great that to get hold of it the U.S. will have to literally make money using a printing press, which creates inflation, which will make matters worse.

Forget American-envy. Now is one time to be thankful we live in Canada in spite of our own spend-fest. Our federal government opted for a much kinder and gentler stimulus package. But the Harper government still decided to spend $40 billion over the next two years. Yes, the bill included tax breaks — a good thing — and Harper felt pressured to spend as the opposition threatened to topple the government if it didn’t. The opposition, specifically the NDP, would have loved to spend more. Crack pipes for all.

But as for Harper, he’s a fiscal conservative. He doesn’t spend other people’s money. So when he does, it’s like a Chinese restaurant deciding suddenly to specialize in hot dogs and fries. It’s no longer a Chinese Restaurant. It’s now American fast food.