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On Thursday the Parliamentary Budget Office released its analysis of the federal government’s desperate, politically motivated purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline and its suspended expansion. This report is, even as I type these words, being treated as ammunition by those who want to have a go at the Liberals for having overpaid a foreign oil company for an asset. There is, however, just enough in it to provide the Liberals with some cover, which they are using.

None of this should be too surprising. The PBO is essentially an accounting firm. Their report is an accounting report, and it takes an accountant’s view of the purchase. That’s just what we want them to be doing. They seem to have done a good job.

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An accountant, in assessing an asset purchase, is confronted with conflicting imperatives: he can try to work out the hypothetical market value of the asset if it were sold to another purchaser (or in another market) immediately, or he can try to guess at the discounted future cash flow from the asset. Neither of these approaches provide much comfort for Trudeau’s government. The buyer of an asset almost always paid more for it than the theoretical runner-up in the auction would have, but with the Trans Mountain package the gap is certainly very large. It might come almost to the total cash value the Liberals paid ($4.4 billion).