The Right in Canada is nothing like the cartoon Right in the US. But, yes, I was sad to see Paul Martin go. If a Liberal candidate of his caliber is on the ballot next time, then I will be sure to vote for him.
By your line of reasoning, a better question might be: what was the unemployment rate before you were born as compared to what it is now? I think we may have isolated the problem.
Using your numbers it has currently cost us roughly 1.2 million dollars per job, you consider that "working pretty good"??? If half is still left to be spent then it only cost us about 600k per job, you consider that money well spent? Time and again it has been proven that these bullshit stimulus packages dont work, by the time the money is deployed the economy is already fixing itself so it is just a colossal waste of money, how did that "stimulus" money work for Japan in the 80's/90's?
Their plan is to simply raise taxes and redistribute wealth, who needs a job when you can simply take some free government cheese.
You have to factor in the economic multiplier effect as well, roughly 10 times, iirc. The time to efficacy issue is a political problem, not an economic one. The Australian government eliminated the middlemen and essentially just gave their stimulus money to their citizenry, who of course spent it immediately. And they were first out of the hole too. Stimulus spending will of course stimulate spending (except for the case where recipients save or hoard it, which was done here to some extent, sadly), that's cause and effect. I know anecdotally from my own business that it is working, and from what I'm reading it is also working for other economies. Is it a tactic that should be used, eg. borrowing from our future labor, that's the real question imho.