Introducing former Saskatchewan finance minister Andrew Thomson as the NDP’s candidate in Eglinton-Lawrence on Friday, Tom Mulcair boasted that Thomson could offer voters in the riding something that his key opponent — Joe Oliver, the federal finance minister — could not: a record of balanced budgets.

Look back at Thomson’s fiscal record in Saskatchewan — the budgets of 2006-07 and 2007-08 — and it becomes clear there was a lot of debate during his tenure over whether the second budget was, in fact, balanced.

“Are you confused about the state of the province’s finances? Uncertain whether Saskatchewan is running a) a balanced budget, b) a $500 million deficit or c)a $700 million deficit?” Bruce Johnstone, the financial editor of the Regina Leader-Post, wrote on March 24, 2007. “After this week’s provincial budget, you have every right to be confused. I certainly am and I’ve been covering these things for nearly 25 years.”

There were number of reasons why Johnstone and others were confused. For one, the budget documents also showed a $701.3 million deficit on a summary financial basis (p.56), which took into account things like the financial results of provincial Crown corporations.

More controversial was the $509.9 million transfer from the province’s Fiscal Stabilization Fund, which the 2007-08 budget says achieved a $75.0 million surplus while leaving a balance of $377.6 million.

“The Fiscal Stabilization Fund (FSF) was created in 2000-01 to stabilize the fiscal position of the Province from year to year and to facilitate the accomplishment of long-term objectives,” the 2007-08 budget reads.

A few days after the publication of Johnstone’s column, Brad Wall — then the leader of the Saskatchewan Party opposition — told the Saskatchewan legislature that Thomson and NDP not only failed to obtain the $75 million surplus they claimed, they also drained the FSF.

“They went from a $158 million surplus last year to a $701 million deficit this year, Mr. Speaker. They drained $500 million, a half a billion dollars, from the Fiscal Stabilization Fund,” Wall charged.

Thomson rejected that argument. “Let me tell you this, Mr. Speaker,” he replied. “The bankers that understand the province’s finances better than just about anybody else have given this budget a passing grade, and they have said very clearly, very clearly that the money that has been outlined is portrayed as a $75 million surplus, that we’re handling our budget appropriately, that we are continuing to pay down debt.”

Asked for a comment on Monday, Thomson stood by his record.

“At the time the right wing opposition was saying that our tax cuts were unsustainable and that we were draining the bank accounts. But the record shows that we left the government with $2B of cash in the bank. Eight years later, our tax cuts are still in place and so are the accounting principles,” he said in an email statement.

In many ways, though, Wall’s criticism of Thomson and the Saskatchewan NDP’s use of the FSF sounded quite a bit like Mulcair’s attacks on the Conservatives’ use of $2 billion from their $3 billion contingency reserve in the 2015 budget. In both cases, rainy day funds helped show a surplus.

On April 21, the day the 2015 budget was tabled, Mulcair took the Conservatives to task for using the contingency reserve, saying “the election” was the contingency they were worried about.

Thomson — who appears to be the NDP’s likeliest choice for finance minister should he and the party win in October — seems to have done essentially the same thing in Saskatchewan.

The 2007-08 Saskatchewan budget was tabled on March 22. The province held an election in November, 2007; Wall and the Saskatchewan Party won.