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The first casualty of the era of open government may be … open government.

Justin Trudeau has shrugged off two emerging political entanglements — the Parliamentary Budget Office’s criticism of the federal budget and blowback over a $500-per-ticket fundraising event with the justice minister — as inconsequential because of the Liberal policy of “openness and transparency.”

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But there is a disconnect between the prime minister’s words and an increasingly inconvenient truth.

A glance at both issues makes obvious the government has been neither open nor transparent.

First, the new PBO report: Jean-Denis Fréchette’s office said Wednesday the Liberals have made it more difficult for parliamentarians to scrutinize the public finances.

This is in part because the government has shortened the time horizon of detailed cost estimates for the measures in its budget, from five years to two. This opacity means there is no detail on the roughly $7.8 billion in spending cuts that the PBO has identified between 2018 and 2020.