A federal budget has just come out that will reduce unemployment to 6 per cent, close tax loopholes, repair cities and institute a forward-looking green strategy.

It is not Jim Flaherty's budget. We will only get that on March 29.

This one is the Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) and it comes from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

The CCPA has been in the alternative budget business for 17 years now.

The Centre undertakes this detailed, labour-intensive exercise in an effort to show, each year, that Canadians have evidence-based fiscal policy options.

There is nothing inevitable -- ordained by the infallible logic of economic science -- about the government of the day's prescriptions or forecasts.

I was watching CNBC and happened to see this panel about how the number of Americans killed by natural disasters has declined over time. It was also noted that, in early 2010, fewer people died in Chile's earthquake than in Haiti's earthquake.

The discussion quite reasonably outlined how improvements in emergency preparedness, building codes, and infrastructure help to protect people from natural disasters. But two minutes into the segment, anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera declared, "The lesson is that capitalism actually saves lives."

On Monday, my hour-long public transit commute turned into a three-hour tour due to a blackout.

I work in the west end of Toronto and live in the east. While my public transit voyage isn't brisk, it usually moves along without incident and I have a lot of time to read. When I arrived at Kipling station on late Monday afternoon, I saw black smoke billowing out of the hydro substation, which sits like a tangled mess of wires and steel about half-a-click away from the subway station.