TORONTO

The Ontario Liberals are so lousy at budgeting that on Monday alone they increased the provincial debt by a whopping $10.7 billion.

No, this time it wasn’t cancelled gas plants. Or tossing billions at needless green schemes that only increase your energy bills.

A dispute between the government and provincial auditor general Bonnie Lysyk has ended up with the books suddenly worse than previously thought. The AG took issue with the fact that the government was taking the surpluses from pension plans for both the teachers and OPSEU and including them on their balance sheets.

Lysyk reportedly told the Liberals to take them off because you can’t claim money on your ledger that isn’t yours to take. No kidding.

Now teachers and public workers know they’re not just used as pawns during election time, but during the annual budget process too.

But the government countered that the practice had been going on their whole time in office, and for two years under the PC government. They were apparently working things out behind the scenes with the AG, when the Liberals suddenly released new and far-from-improved financial statements without Lysyk’s input.

At a time when the Liberals’ financial credibility can’t go any lower, it’s a reckless move.

Then again, they’ve been reckless about money matters since before they were in power. It all started back during the 2003 election when then opposition leader Dalton McGuinty signed the taxpayers pledge. No new taxes, he promised. Then he broke the promise that very term.

And do we really know to this day the extent of what happened at eHealth and Ornge? Will we ever really know what happened during the gas plants scandal? And how many more stories do we need to run about seniors and low-income Ontarians being driven into energy poverty by cynical partisan decisions?

Since 2003, the Ontario Liberals have consistently made the fiscal file worse. The Liberals inherited a $65-billion budget from the PCs. Now it’s at over $130 billion. And the debt was around $140 billion. Now it’s crossing $300 billion.

It took from 1867 to 2003 to get to the figures the Liberals inherited. Yet the Liberals managed to double those numbers in a mere dozen years.

A Treasury Board statement released Monday says “the change in accounting treatment is not a reflection on the funding status of the plans, or the quality of financial reporting by the province.”

Really? It’s hard to believe there’s a single person left in this province who doesn’t doubt the quality of financial management by the government.

Finance Minister Charles Sousa said in the legislature that despite this news, the budget will still be balanced by 2018. In the comedy of errors that is Ontario money matters, that’s a good spot to cue the laugh track.