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There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

That’s the message Ontario voters sent to the Ontario Liberals in June’s last election as it reduced the party to rubble and all of 7 seats, stripping the Grits of official status in the Legislative Assembly.

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For 15 years, the Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne governments presided over “the largest debt accumulation in Ontario’s history,” according to the Fraser Institute, which as of March 31, 2018 was nearly $350 billion.

According to Vic Fedeli, the Finance Minister, our deficit has doubled to $15-billion, up from the $6.7-billion Wynne claimed in her last budget.

Photo by Ernest Doroszuk / Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/Postmedia

And our over-the-top deficit was not inevitable or a consequence of outside cataclysmic forces. Just look at Quebec. That province eliminated its deficit in 2015-2016. Since then it has piled on billions of dollars in surpluses.

Part of the reason for Ontario’s financial chaos was simply playing with the numbers to reduce actual deficit numbers. A little miscalculation was attributed to an “accounting disagreement” with the Auditor General. The Liberal government decided to change the way it tracks debt. And just like that, a big chunk of it disappeared. The problem is, it didn’t. It was just hidden from us.