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Her team looked at emails from the upper reaches of several government ministries, though the Ministry of Energy kept some back, Lysyk’s report says.

“Hopefully they’ll come to the conclusion that it can be financed by the province … rather than externally, as that would be a lot simpler and cheaper,” she quotes one unnamed senior official, in an email.

Nope. OPG is borrowing the money on our behalf and then there’s a complicated interplay of regulatory and financial manoeuvres to book money we’re expecting hydro users to pay for electricity in the 2020s, ’30s and ’40s as assets that balance off the debt. The essence of the scheme is to say Ontarians are borrowing these billions of dollars as hydro ratepayers, not as voting citizens. Same people, different hats, different rules.

All of which is bull, Lysyk says. The point of accounting is to tell you how much money you have, how much you owe and how much you are owed. That’s what the standards for Canadian public-sector accounting are supposed to achieve.

“These standards are there to ensure that the financial reporting of government policy decisions reflects common sense: borrowings are debt, unearned revenue is not an asset today and when your expenses exceed your revenues, you incur a deficit,” Lysysk said Tuesday. Nobody has used electricity in 2025 yet, let alone 2040. You can’t count guesstimates of use and prices 20 years down the line as an asset today.

The usefulness of doing so was visible when Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault and Treasury Board President Liz Sandals responded to Lysyk’s report. They think the $4-billion estimate for the extra cost of hiding the debt is too high. They argue the gap between the government’s interest rate and Ontario Power Generation’s might not be as big as the financial accountability office thinks.