Comparing Canadian and US unemployment rates during the recession and recovery

The striking feature of this diagram is how the Canadian and US unemployment rates moved so incredibly similarly until after Obama's $830 billion "Stimulus" was passed.
Sources: for Canada and the US.

UPDATE3: Welcome to those from Talking Point Memo, though TPM has made multiple incorrect claims. While TPM cites Bachmann's tweet, Eric Kleefeld doesn't mention fails to mention her Facebook post. Tweets limit posts to 140 characters, Bachmann's was 138, not much extra to into extra details or even longer words such as "small" or "little" instead of "no." It is true that Bachmann's tweet said Canada had "no stimulus," but her simultaneous Facebook post was much more complete: "Consider Canada, whose unemployment equaled America's at the bill's passage. Now, without massive gov't intervention, the Canadian unemployment rate is a full 20% less than ours." There was nothing wrong with that Facebook post, but mentioning it would have made TPM's article a lot less compelling. (Note that the "Markie Marxist sez" shown in the picture below is from the first comment on my post.)

UPDATE1: What I have pointed out is that Obama's "Stimulus" was three times bigger on a per capita basis than the Canadian stimulus, and Obama raised marginal income tax rates while Canada has cut marginal tax rates. For a discussion on the massive difference in size and composition of the conservative minority Canadian government and the liberal/Keynesian/Obama US stimulus program see this here.

TPM's claim about relatively strict banking regulations in Canada is wrong on two counts. 1) Most importantly, it doesn't explain the sharp difference in unemployment rates between Canada and the US right after the Obama "Stimulus." Before the Stimulus, the unemployment rates were moving together very closely. After the Stimulus, the US rates rose much higher than the Canadian rate. 2) It is factually wrong anyway. Canada simply didn't have the crazy types of government regulations that the US has had that forced banks to make loans that they didn't want to make (see here for some examples).

UPDATE2: I could rewrite what I have already put up about the banking regulations in Canada, but TPM readers just keep repeating what they read on that website without any recognition that it is nonsensical. Even if the claim about regulations were true (and it isn't), it can't explain why the changes in unemployment in the two countries were identical right up until Obama's Stimulus and then the unemployment rate diverged dramatically.

abudzar