A federal budget is, to put it mildly, always a big deal. It’s not hard to see why. These annual rituals of Parliament lay out how the party in power plans to spend more than $200 billion of our money in the next fiscal year. That works out to about $7,000 in spending for every man, woman and child in the country.

With stakes like that, it’s no surprise that the 145 budgets since Confederation have always been attention-getters. They can enchant or enrage. They can empower or embitter. They can even lead to a change in power.

We looked at federal budgets of the last few decades to find some of the more noteworthy ones.