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According to Lysyk, who is now Ontario’s auditor general, successive Saskatchewan governments of varying party stripes have made it a practice to issue two sets of books each year. While both are publicly available, she said the government focuses on the one that includes only a portion of the government’s financial activities and which can easily be manipulated “to portray whichever financial picture the government would like.”

If Saskatchewan issued only one set of books that included the entire government’s financial activities — following the same accounting procedure that is “standard” in every other province and the federal government — Lysyk said, “It would actually have presented deficit budgets instead of ’balanced budgets’ in nine out of the last 10 years.”

That includes deficits of $253 million and $310 million in 2006 and 2007 when Thomson held the purse strings, according to Lysyk.

The province’s anomalous method of reporting its budgets is highly misleading and confusing to the public, media outlets and even to respected think tanks, like the C.D. Howe Institute, which Lysyk said has inadvertently compared Saskatchewan’s inaccurate balanced budget reports with financial reports of other provinces without realizing it was comparing “apples to oranges.”

Mulcair may have fallen victim to the same confusion.

“The NDP’s Andrew Thomson offers the people of Eglinton-Lawrence something that Joe Oliver hasn’t: a record of balanced budgets,” Mulcair boasted last month when he introduced his new star candidate.