The Manitoba Liberals didn’t think it was necessary to incorporate the costs of the party’s election promises into their long-awaited, five-year financial plan unveiled Monday.

Odd, considering that’s what a financial plan is supposed to be. You know, revenues, expenses — a bottom line.

But apparently that’s not the case with this gang. Instead, the Liberals released a spreadsheet that for the most part doesn’t add up, is riddled with errors, and is missing an entire fiscal year.

The list of shortcomings in this financial plan is long. The costing on debt financing is wrong. The revenue calculations are off. And the claim by Liberal leader Rana Bokhari that her party would balance the province’s books in “five to six years from now” is based on a pipe dream that’s not backed up by simple arithmetic.

Sure, none of this matters much at the end of the day since the Liberals have no chance whatsoever of forming government. But laying out a well-researched financial plan as an alternative to what the two other major parties are offering would have gone a long way towards giving the Liberals some much-needed credibility in this election campaign.

Sadly for them, they missed that chance.

Bokhari was asked repeatedly by reporters Monday why she didn’t include the $200-odd million in election promises she’s made so far in the Liberal’s financial projections. Her five-year plan shows an $11-million budget surplus by 2020-21 — after you make the correction on the spread sheet the Liberals handed out that omitted the year 2017-18. However, the surplus is a false number because the spending projections don’t include the 19 campaign commitments they’ve made so far, which add up to $144 million in the first year and grow to about $200 million annually by the fifth year.

Bokhari could not provide a coherent answer when asked why those costs were not included in the projections.

“We’re comfortable with the numbers,” she said. “Again this is about the plan, we’re planning on controlling government spending.”

The financial plan shows the current government is projecting a deficit of $686 million in 2015-16. It’s actually $646 million. The Liberals have the deficit projection for 2016-17 at $569 million in their sheet. The real number is $539 million.

Also, Bokhari’s plan is based on 4% annual growth in revenues over five years. But they have it calculated wrong in the projections. They overestimated revenues by $51 million. Which means even without adding the cost of their campaign commitments, they still have a deficit of $40 million at the end of their five-year plan.

The Liberals also have debt financing charges fixed at $215 million a year in their projections, as if those costs aren’t going to rise. The Liberals would continue to incur deficits and the province’s debt would soar under their plan. Which means the cost to service that debt would also have to rise. But that’s not reflected in their numbers. When asked about that, Bokhari couldn’t provide a coherent answer.

“The plan is to reduce the deficit,” she said.

Bokhari was also asked how she planned to manage the province’s soaring debt. She said she didn’t know.

And when pressed, Bokhari said she would leave the door open to running deficits beyond five or six years if necessary to avoid cuts to important front-line services.

“If it takes longer to balance, absolutely we’ll do that,” she said. “If it means we’re running a deficit for a bit longer, absolutely.”

In other words, Bokhari and the Liberals don’t have a clue how they would manage the province’s finances if they were in government. And the plan, if you want to call it that, they released is little more than a blue print to maintain the status quo of perennial deficits, high taxes and heavy spending.

And I doubt there’s much of an appetite among Manitoba voters for more of that.