If it accomplishes nothing else, last week’s revelation that theEves government had run up a deficit of $5.6 billion should forever dispelthe quaint notion that the Conservatives are sound fiscal managers. In placeof this myth, it established a new, more realistic, image for right-wingpoliticians: that they routinely use accounting tricks and withhold thetruth from voters.

Of course, it’s hardly a new thing for an outgoing government tosaddle its successor with a financial mess that they weren’t expecting.Recall that, in 1990, the Peterson Liberals claimed to be running a healthysurplus, but actually saddled the incoming Rae government with a $2.5billion deficit. What is so breathtaking in this case — even for those ofus who saw through the Tories’ duplicity — is the massive scale of the misrepresentation.

According to former Provincial Auditor Erik Peters, there areseveral key reasons for the large shortfall. The Tories had sold only a tinyfraction of the $2 billion in assets that they said they expected to sell(although plans were apparently being developed to sell off the LCBO and torevive the privatization of Hydro One). They projected $700 million inadministrative cuts, but hadn’t even begun to look for these so-calledefficiencies. And, they didn’t even account for the hundreds of millions ofdollars that they were spending to cap hydro rates. Peters was much toodiplomatic to say so, but it is absolutely clear from his report that theTories — every last one of them — lied about the state of the province’sfinances.

At the press conference at which his findings were announced,Peters advocated legislation to make future budgets “more transparent.” Healso criticized legislation that mandates balanced budgets for creating aclimate in which governments are unwilling to admit the truth about theprovince’s finances. Peters compared that situation to business executivesbeing told that they had to turn a profit every year, noting that they wouldlikely use every trick in the book to show a profit to their board. Havingpromised that paper tiger known as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that itwould honour this law, however, Dalton McGuinty is hardly in the position tomove to remove this straightjacket.

Indeed, the only thing more bothersome than the Tories’duplicity is the Liberals’ exaggerated surprise at the existence and scopeof the deficit. While their decision to have Peters examine the books ontheir behalf was wise, both fiscally and politically, they can’t really findhis results as “shocking” as Finance Minister Greg Sorbara now claims. Forstarters, Sorbara was a member of the Peterson cabinet in 1990, so he knowsa fair bit about how this is done. As well, it’s not as if the Liberals didn’t have plenty of warning that the Tories were fudging their numbers. Bondrating agencies, think tanks at both ends of the political spectrum, andeven the NDP warned them not to rely on the Tory numbers in developing theirown fiscal plan. They went ahead and did so.

But, as The Toronto Star noted in an editorial following Peters’ report,if Dalton McGuinty had admitted what he knew about the looming deficitduring the election campaign, he “wouldn’t have been able to get away withthe platform he callously built on the Tory assumption of balanced budgetscontinuing as far as the eye could see. Yes, callously. For how else toexplain McGuinty’s reliance on Tory budget assumptions to show his plan tobe ‘responsible and affordable’ set out in the very same campaign literaturehe used to quote ‘the experts (who) say that the Tory numbers do not add up.âe(TM)By relying on the same numbers he said don’t add up, McGuinty was able toclaim that cancelling promised future Tory tax cuts would give him surplusfunds to spend, where now that the truth is out, we know that cancellingthose tax cuts will only keep the deficit from getting even bigger than italready is.”

The editorial also points out that “in robbing Howard Hampton’sNew Democrats of even official party status, the voters punished the oneleader who was prepared to tell us the truth — about the deficit and thefact that if we wanted better services from government, we would have to paymore for them.”

Flashing back to the Liberals’ “Dalton and a tree” ads from the pre-electionperiod, I again chuckle at my favourite line: “People ask me how I canpromise to improve their services while balancing the budget and not raisingtheir taxes. Am I an optimist? Maybe.”

Assuming that he has finally decidedwhether he really is an optimist, McGuinty is going to need a lot more thanoptimism to balance the books — and to restore his own credibility.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...