Two years ago now, Andrew Scheer spent the final days of his campaign to lead the Conservative party brandishing his credentials as a fiscal and social conservative.

He would balance the budget quickly, within two years. He would give parents a tax writeoff if they send their children to private schools or do home schooling.

Now, as the Conservatives populate their election platform with major pieces of policy, those two commitments are missing in action from Scheer’s speeches.

They are front and centre for Liberals, however, as they relentlessly try to make the case that Andrew Scheer equals Doug Ford, with all the unpopular cuts that the premier’s quest to balance the Ontario budget entails.

Scheer’s officials won’t say whether those promises from the leadership campaign still stand, and that only makes the Liberals’ case stronger.

The Liberals have been keeping a tally on Scheer’s spending promises, and so far, they are adding up to many billions of dollars in new spending.

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(Math alert! You can do it!)

The Liberals estimate that the schooling measures alone would cost about $400 million a year.

Making parental leave tax free would cost about $900 million a year, by the Conservatives’ estimation. The removal of the GST on home heating would be $1.6 billion a year.

More recently, Scheer has committed to talks with the United States to join a continental ballistic missile defence program. And this week, he promised extra funding to deal with human trafficking. Neither of those have a fixed price tag yet, but joining the defence initiative would be in the billions.

The Liberals have taken most of these numbers, subtracted for some cuts that Scheer has said he will make to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, shaken and stirred … and produced a graph that shows the Conservatives need to cut $55 billion in spending if they want to balance the budget in two years.

On the cost-cutting side, the graph does not appear to subtract for Scheer’s plans to cancel the Canada Infrastructure Bank or get rid of corporate subsidies. But it also does not add costs for missile defence or human trafficking.

“Ontarians know what it’s like to be told that there will be no cuts only to find out after the election that that promise wasn’t true,” says MP Marco Mendicino in a Liberal party press release, warning ominously about the Ford experience that has crept up on taxpayers by stealth after what seemed like a relatively benign first budget earlier this spring.

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Liberals feel the pitch has been resonating, especially among the Ontario voters they need so badly. Conservatives say they will make everything add up properly in plenty of time for the election.

While no leader would be expected run an election campaign without costly promises, Scheer’s math problem is his balanced-budget commitment.

“There’s always pressure to spend more and spend more. The two-year target is an important signal to say when we’re back in power in 2019, we will get back to balanced budgets in a very aggressive timeline because we’re borrowing money from our kids every time we run a deficit,” he said two years ago.

Since becoming leader, however, the commitment has quieted. He has pointedly avoided mentioning a timeline in the past few months, including this week when he was asked yet again. Now he says “we can get a lot of the way there” if spending is kept to below the rate of inflation and population growth.

Inflation is running just under 2 per cent a year, while population growth is just over 1 per cent, so Scheer is suggesting spending should be kept below about 3 per cent.

But the projections in the current budget show total program spending is already at that pace, rising by about 3 per cent or below for the next five years — and deficits persist anyway.

Separately, Scheer’s officials have said that restraining spending increases to 1 per cent a year would lead to elimination of the deficit within four or five years.

That’s not a commitment though. Rather it’s part of an equation. Another part of that equation is Scheer’s commitment last week to keep spending intact for the Canada Child Benefit, seniors benefits and transfers to the provinces. Those make up more than half the government’s spending every year.

Really, once fixed commitments are taken into account, the only flexible part of government spending is operating expenses, which is about 30 per cent of the total budget or about $97-billion these days. With other costs rising over time, that’s a small pot to shoulder large restraint.

Which, if you ask the Liberals, adds up to a Doug Ford scenario of painful cuts to government programs.

But here’s the big question. Where will the fiscal situation end up if Scheer wants to cut taxes?

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