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The government would have you believe it is a result of rigorous control of spending. Yet spending for the coming fiscal year, at $122 billion, is $6 billion higher than projected two years ago; for next year, it is $4 billion higher than projected last year. At roughly $8,500 per capita, spending is not only one-third higher than under the Mike Harris Conservatives — after inflation, after population growth — it is 30 per cent higher than under Bob Rae and the NDP. Even as a proportion of GDP, a much more forgiving standard, it is higher than in all but three years of the province’s history, prior to the coming of the Liberals.

So no, spending is not under control. Such progress as is being made against the deficit — again, we are still pretending this has some meaning, of a kind that might be understood by, say, humans — is all on the revenue side: up 6.8 per cent in the last fiscal year, and projected to grow another 9 per cent over the next two. Perhaps this is the fruit of rapid economic growth? Not so much: notwithstanding the combined stimulus of $30 oil, a 72 cent dollar, a growing U.S. economy and near-zero interest rates, growth is projected to slide from 2.5 per cent last year to 2.0 per cent in 2019.

That revenues are nonetheless projected to soar represents one part wishful thinking, one part federal transfers — Ontario now depends on Ottawa for nearly $25 billion annually, twice what it received a decade ago — and one part dodgy accounting. In the current fiscal year, for example, the government will book $1.1 billion from its “Asset Optimization Strategy,” otherwise known as the partial sale of Hydro One: a one-time gain that does nothing for the government’s fiscal position in the longer term (though it hopes to eke out another $4.6 billion in asset sales in coming years). For the next fiscal year, it plans on collecting $500 million from the sale of carbon permits under its new cap and trade plan, rising to $1.9 billion the following year.