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This is, needless to say, unacceptable. It is our money governments are spending; those in temporary charge of their finances are our employees. Their responsibility is to tell us clearly how much of our money they are spending, and on what; instead, they seem to do their level best to be as obscure and misleading as possible.

Which raises the question, again, of why we entrust the public accounts to people with a proven record of lying to us?

It is time, surely, to take the books away from the cooks: to hand formal responsibility for recording and stating the government’s financial position to an independent and impartial body, at arms’ length from ministers and their staff. Governments would have access to these figures on the same basis as anyone else, without the ability to spin or manipulate them to their advantage.

Watchdogs like the Parliamentary Budget Officer or the Auditor General can only do so much: they can present their findings, but they are not binding on governments, who are free to pretend they are mere matters of opinion, or “accounting disputes.”

Neither are opposition parties much use. As politicians, they have as much of an interest as those in government in pretending resources are more plentiful than they are. Ontario’s current opposition leaders are typical: puffed up with pretended rage at the government’s “fraud,” while quietly basing their own election promises on the same discredited numbers.

That’s not good enough. There’s no reason why everyone — government, opposition, and public — should not be working off the same set of honest numbers. Governments are entitled to their own policies. They are not entitled to their own figures.