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But instead of adding the reserve to their deficit and coming up with a total of $4.7 billion, they subtract it to get $3.3 billion.

The NDP platform does the same thing every year for the five years it looks ahead. By the end of a full term, the party platform says a New Democrat government would be running a deficit of $2 billion when it should be $3.4 billion.

(We can only see this because the party went to such trouble to produce a costed platform and share it early. That’s worth something. The Progressive Conservatives have no such document so nobody knows what their budgets would look like. Possibly not even they do.)

Ontario governments have to include reserves in their budgets, under a 2004 law the Liberals passed to show how good they were going to be with the treasury.

“The fiscal plan must include a reserve to provide for unexpected adverse changes in revenues and expenses, in whole or in part,” the Fiscal Transparency and Accountability Act says.

The law doesn’t say how big the reserve has to be. There’s no formula. As finance minister, the Liberals’ Charles Sousa has plugged anything from $600 million to $1.1 billion as reserves into his budgets, depending on both genuine prudence and on political calculations about what bottom-line figures the Liberals wanted to show off.

The thing is, the reserve has to be booked as an expense. If you get to the end of the year and you haven’t spent it, you get to treat it as found money. Spend it, talk about all the money you saved because you’re such great managers, or a bit of both. But when you’re making up your budget, the reserve is money you’re ready to spend if you have to.