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TORONTO — Ontario’s Liberal government was already in dire straits, badly trailing the Progressive Conservatives in poll after poll.

But the party’s prospects in the run-up to the June provincial election took a positively bleak turn Wednesday as the province’s auditor general released a bombshell report suggesting the Liberals had “dramatically” understated their projected deficits by billions of dollars a year.

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Questionable, opaque accounting has hidden the true state of the province’s books, while the financial watchdog herself was kept “out of the loop,” said an unusually blunt Bonnie Lysyk.

“They took a risk and fortunately, I would say, for all the legislators and for the citizens, my staff is pretty strong and we figured out what was going on,” said the soft-spoken auditor general. “And it’s not right.”

The government had already promised an array of new spending programs that would on their own generate large deficits for the next six years.