More from Tasha Kheiriddin available More fromavailable here

“I want to remind the Leader of the Opposition that he heads a party that maintained throughout the course of one entire election that there was no deficit … The fact of the matter is you were hiding a $5.6-billion deficit … I say to the Leader of the Opposition, our legislation is going to put a stop to the kind of games that he and the former government played for eight long years.”

Who said those words? Was it Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, reacting this week to the news from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that Canada will ring in four years of deficits instead of the balanced budget claimed by the Conservatives?

Nope. That was then-Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, addressing Queen’s Park on December 1, 2003. After defeating Ernie Eves’ Progressive Conservatives in the October provincial election, McGuinty asked former provincial auditor Erik Peters to examine the state of Ontario’s finances. Instead of an expected $2 billion deficit, Peters found a $5.6 billion hole. Rather than keep McGuinty’s balanced budget promise and fill the hole, successive Liberal governments proceeded to dig it even deeper.

McGuinty had been elected on a much-publicized pledge of no deficits and no tax increases. In his first year in office, he broke both those promises — and over the following decade, Ontario witnessed the fastest accumulation of provincial debt in its history. According to Livio Di Matteo, economics professor at Lakehead University and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, “between 2003 and 2014, net public debt grew to $287.3 billion from $138.8 billion — an increase of $148.5-billion. The net debt-to-GDP ratio grew to 40 per cent from 27.5 per cent.” While the recession exacerbated the situation, Di Matteo notes that spending on health and education, as well as on debt, actually started rising in 2004.

The PBO report now gives Trudeau a McGuinty-esque out, carte blanche to run Canada’s finances deeper into the red — which is likely where he will go. And he’ll get no pushback from his advisors. The PBO report now gives Trudeau a McGuinty-esque out, carte blanche to run Canada’s finances deeper into the red — which is likely where he will go. And he’ll get no pushback from his advisors.

After McGuinty stepped down in 2014, his successor, Premier Kathleen Wynne, continued to run the province in the red, and plans to do so until 2018. Ontario’s debt currently costs $11 billion a year just to service — a number that would be much higher if interest rates were not at historic lows.

That payment represents 9 per cent of the province’s $132 billion budget and is roughly equal to the amount of money received in corporate taxes. It’s $11 billion that can’t be spent on infrastructure (which is crumbling), hospitals (where wait times are up) or schools (where the government is cutting services).

Back in Ottawa, what has Trudeau promised? “Modest” deficits of $10 billion a year, on a $300 billion budget. But on September 21, he tempered that promise, saying that if the federal government’s fiscal situation turned out to be worse, his deficits might be bigger. In response to a question from a Radio Canada reporter, Trudeau said in French, “We are committed to balancing the budget in 2019, and we have always said that we will have modest deficits for the first three years … We have also said that, if the situation gets radically worse, we might revise these numbers.”

Surprisingly, the remark didn’t get a lot of attention. But it and the PBO report now give Trudeau a McGuinty-esque out, carte blanche to run Canada’s finances deeper into the red — which is likely where he will go. And he’ll get no pushback from his advisors.

That’s because the same people who oversaw the explosion of public debt under McGuinty are now running the federal government. Gerald Butts was policy advisor and principal secretary to McGuinty; he’s a close friend of Trudeau’s, serves as his policy advisor and was one of the key architects of his campaign. Katie Telford worked for McGuinty minister Gerard Kennedy; she was Trudeau’s campaign director and now will be chief of staff in the PMO.

And just as Ontario did for McGuinty, the Canadian public likely will give Trudeau the benefit of the doubt with a protracted honeymoon period. In December 2003, two months after the October 2 election, a poll by Ipsos Reid found that 58 per cent of Ontarians thought McGuinty was justified in breaking his no-deficit-no-tax-increase pledge; 65 per cent of voters believed the higher deficit numbers were “real”. And 51 per cent supported the Liberals, higher than the 46 per cent of the popular vote they received on election day.

Observed John Wright, then senior vice-president at Ipsos Reid, “These guys are golden. The public is onside with them. The opposition attacks aren’t working.”

The people in Trudeau’s office know these quotes. They know these numbers. They also know what they did to Ontario. And, unfortunately for Canadian taxpayers, they’re counting on being able to do it again.

Tasha Kheiriddin is a political writer and broadcaster who frequently comments in both English and French. After practising law and a stint in the government of Mike Harris, Tasha became the Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and co-wrote the 2005 bestseller, Rescuing Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution. Tasha moved back to Montreal in 2006 and served as vice-president of the Montreal Economic Institute, and later director for Quebec of the Fraser Institute, while also lecturing on conservative politics at McGill University. Tasha now lives in Whitby, Ontario with her daughter Zara, born in 2009.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.