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Take, as a current example, the Saudi arms deal. That the Liberals are willing to sell $15 billion worth of gun-mounted armoured vehicles to one of the world’s most repressive regimes may be put down to the exigencies of state: the Saudis are, after all, our allies, at least in the Middle Eastern sense of the word. That they did so in apparent violation of federal law may be dismissed as a matter of interpretation. Perhaps, as the government says, it would have been too costly to cancel the deal. Perhaps it would have been better never to have signed it.

But what is beyond dispute is that the decision to allow the deal to go ahead, including issuing the export permits without which it could not proceed, was entirely the Liberals’ doing. Yet until last week’s revelation of the minister of global Affairs’ recent decision to sign off on the permits, the Liberals had insisted the contract the Conservatives had bequeathed them was a fait accompli. This was generally understood to mean the export permits had already been issued.

In fairness, the Liberals never said they would cancel the deal, not even during the last election. That would distinguish this bit of dishonesty from the many things the Liberals did promise to do, or not to do, on which they have since reneged: the 25,000 Syrian refugees who were to have been admitted by December, the F-35s that were to have been ruled out of the bidding on a new fighter jet contract; the “combat mission” against ISIL that was to have been ended, not redefined; and of course the litany of broken promises in the budget, from the $10-billion ceiling on the deficit to the balanced budget by 2020 to the small business tax cut to the new health accord with the provinces (health spending is now projected to rise by less than it would have under the terms set out by the Harper government) and beyond.