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The auditor has renewed her complaint repeatedly. The legislature’s separate financial accountability office has echoed it. The opposition parties have pounded the Liberals in the legislature on it. Tory finance critic Vic Fedeli has done so in question period almost every day for weeks at a time

Then last fall, Lysyk issued a 50-page special report on the financial jiggery-pokery in the Fair Hydro Plan. Here’s the title of Chapter 1: “Government Legislated an Accounting/Financing Structure to Improperly Avoid Showing a Deficit and an Increase in Net Debt.” That’s unwieldy wording but it’s hard to miss the message.

What the Liberals have done is self-serving but it’s all been executed in the open. Figuring out how to fix it does not require a team of forensic accountants. You just move those two items into a different section of the spreadsheet.

Of course, if you’re intending to balance the provincial budget, that deepens the hole quite a bit and you have to find the $5 billion somewhere. In their now-inoperative People’s Guarantee, the Tories used both of the Liberals’ tricks. The New Democrats’ platform does the same thing. Which isn’t great if behaving this way is one of the largest financial scandals in Canadian history.

“We are putting out a costed plan,” Ford said. (He’d once promised a blueprint for his government with financial figures attached, then backtracked, and now he’s tracked forward again.) “We’re going to do this in a modest, a responsible fashion. We never knew there was an additional $5 billion (to find).”

Again, that is false. Maybe Ford didn’t know. His party definitely did. Fedeli, for one, predicted the $5-billion figure before the auditor announced it because he can read and add two numbers together.