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The division between Toronto and Not-Toronto, the government is keen for you to know, is based on population: Greater Toronto has slightly more than half the people in Ontario, so it’s getting slightly more than half the money.

“This means, for example, that funds raised from the residents of Thunder Bay won’t be spent on infrastructure in downtown Toronto,” the government says. This is the sort of language the Liberals used in the 2014 election when they wanted to keep themselves from being seen as the Toronto Party.

Ottawa’s own transportation planners figure our share of the $15 billion is $2 billion, if you divvy it up by population. The calculation is in a brand-new report, released Monday evening, that explains how there shouldn’t be a problem paying for the next stage of light rail.

But the money is not being divided by population, some of it is already gone, and it’s not necessarily being spent on what you’d expect.

You’ll have heard that Ontario plans to spend $1 billion on readying the “Ring of Fire” mineral deposits in the North (well north of Thunder Bay, in fact, where very few funds are raised from anyone) for exploitation with improved highways and rail lines. It turns out the billion dollars to build mining roads to Greater Attawapiskat is to come out of the transportation and infrastructure funds for Not-Toronto, including Ottawa and London and Sudbury and Windsor.

Until recently, this was fairly cleverly concealed in the Liberals’ campaign and financial documents, in which the Ring of Fire money is treated as its own item, separate from the money for transportation projects. The 2014 provincial budget, for instance, had a bunch of distinct bullet points: $29 billion for transportation, $700 million for hospitals, $11 billion for schools, $1 billion for the Ring of Fire.