The news that the Wildrose caucus has brought a huge deficit to the newly merged United Conservative Party caucus should be a huge embarrassment to former Wildrose Leader Brian Jean in his bid to become the elected leader of the UCP.

But coming so soon after the embarrassing news that former Wildrose Finance critic Derek Fildebrandt was renting out his taxpayer-funded apartment on Airbnb (and, perhaps, double-dipping his meal expenses), the public perception might just be that the whole of the UCP are hypocrites.

It’s astonishing that it’s the Wildrose side of the UCP equation – not the Tory half – that has come to the merger with a $322,000 hole in its caucus budget. (The Tories are responsible for the other $15,000 out of a total shortfall of $337,000.)

Wildrose was always perceived as the more upright (and uptight) of the two parties. If anything, Wildrose was TOO pure, TOO moralistic.

Then came word last month that the former party’s Penny-Pincher-in-Chief, Strathmore-Brooks MLA Derek Fildebrandt, had potentially been taking a taxpayer subsidy to defray the cost of his apartment while in Edmonton on MLA business, while at the same time renting out that apartment on the popular home-sharing site Airbnb and pocketing the extra cash.

Fildebrandt and other MLAs also filed for per diems that were to cover the cost of their meals while also simultaneously submitting receipts for individual meals and expecting to be reimbursed

This apparent "double-dipping" was not confined to Fildebrandt or to former Wildrose MLAs alone. Members from other parties were implicated, too.

And in their defence, the MLAs insisted they had mostly taken per diems to cover their own meals and submitted claims only for meals they purchased for constituents or others they were doing official business with. Interim leader Nathan Cooper also acknowledged some administrative errors in mid-August totally just over $550.

Still, the smear was there.

The UCP caucus had to accept Fildebrandt’s resignation, if only for a few months, just to limit the political damage. Otherwise, lots of voters might have thought the new UCP was merely a reincarnation of the old, entitled, wasteful Tory party of Alison Redford.

Now comes the revelation that while Jean was Wildrose leader and in charge of his caucus’s budget, his party racked up a deficit of nearly a third of a million dollars in just the first half of 2017.

Given that his caucus’s budget over that period was around $1.5 million – paid for by taxpayers – that deficit works out to over 21 per cent. To put that in perspective, the NDP government’s deficit (about which Wildrose so frequently complained) works out to about 19 per cent of the provincial budget.

That should truly be a blow to Jean’s leadership hopes.

Knowing that Jean cannot balance a caucus budget would make it soooo easy for the NDP to rebuff any attack a Jean-led UCP would make on provincial finances, should Jean become UCP leader in the vote on Oct. 28.

It should be doubly crippling for Jean’s leadership campaign that members of his former caucus said over the weekend that they had sensed their party’s legislature offices were overspending recklessly, but that Jean and his staff would never give them straight answers to questions they asked about the caucus budget.

Scott Cyr, the former Wildrose deputy whip (and an accountant in civilian life), said he asked repeatedly for detailed ledgers, but never got them.

This should create a huge credibility gap for Jean (who claims caucus budgeting is seasonal and the deficit will disappear before year-end).

Jean needs the rank-and-file of his former party to get behind him in the UCP leadership race. But honesty and fiscal prudence are huge issues for the old Wildrosers.

Jean looks simply like any other loose-with-a-buck politician.