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The muddled math of the Million Jobs Plan has cast a long shadow over this election and for good reason.

The Progressive Conservatives appear to have misstated the number of jobs that would be created by a magnitude of eight in some cases. In the wake of that jaw-dropping gaffe, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne’s release of her party’s platform in Thunder Bay — on the eve of the northern Ontario debate — was a relative non-event. After all, the Grit platform was based closely on their 2014 budget, with only a few minor non-spending tweaks.

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But just because the Liberal platform promises aren’t new, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in them to criticize. Indeed, far from it.

We can start with the very fact that the Liberal platform is the budget. That means the entire resources of the province’s finance department went into costing and formulating a political party’s platform. That would be the case for any governing party that fell on its fiscal plan, but it’s worth remembering that squads of bureaucrats worked on what has become a partisan document.