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The government line on this is that this does not count, because all of this new borrowing will be for investments in capital assets, rather than operating spending. A budget handout helpfully refers to the former as “Good Debt,” while the latter is “Bad Debt,” a somewhat unfortunate phrase for the government with the largest debt of any sub-national jurisdiction in the world.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is to note that the $10 billion in new borrowing is also equal to how much program spending for the coming fiscal year, at roughly $130 billion, has increased over what it was projected to be just two budgets ago. Had they kept to that not very exacting standard of fiscal discipline — spending would still have been higher, after inflation and population growth, than at any time in the province’s history prior to 2010, nearly one-fourth higher than in the last days of Bob Rae — there would have been no increase in either Good or Bad Debt.

Of course, the distinction between Good and Bad Debt depends on a critical assumption: that borrowing to spend on capital assets results in higher economic growth and therefore higher government revenues, sufficient to offset the associated increase in interest costs.

There is no particular reason to believe this, just because it pleases the government to assert it; certainly the budget provides no evidence of it.

But never mind: the budget is balanced! The shortfall between what the government chooses to call “revenues” and what it counts as “spending” has been reduced to zero! Er, well, about that: The opposition Conservatives helpfully pointed out that the government is counting several billion dollars in revenues against the deficit that are either the result of one-time asset sales (of government buildings and the like), or were supposed to have been quarantined inside separate dedicated accounts. Federal transfers, likewise, are to spike this year, at $25.7 billion; they are forecast to decline in coming years. (The budget includes the obligatory annual complaint about the inadequacy of federal transfers. In fact, at 18.1 per cent of provincial revenues, they are half-again as large as when the Liberals took power.)