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Originally Posted by GP_Matt
Is your premise that "All parties were wrong therefore the PC's can be forgiven"
Their budget was the furthest from the truth even though they were the only party that had a department full of people working on said budget. The Liberals received some office funding as the official opposition which would allow them to hire a few employees to do things like comb through the budget looking for errors. The WRA had no/minimal funding at the time but more donations coming in. They also had someone go through the PC budget. Both parties found 3 billion dollars worth of inconsistencies in the PC budget and stated in the election campaign that that should be fixed. The PC's denied this and ran on a campaign that everything was great.
The fact that the other two parties found half the errors in the PC budget should be noteworthy. They should not be dismissed for missing the other half of the errors.
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My premise is that all of the budgets proved wrong because of their reliance on fossil fuel revenue and needing to predict that price. The Wildrose were planning to slash spending, which would've affected the delivery of services, but we never did find out where they were cutting. The one big ticket cut for them was CCS and that was a red herring because it wouldn't have saved anywhere near as much as they alleged. We knew that from day one, and I had them running a deficit even with their resource revenue being in line. Honestly, when you say the Wildrose had the budget at the same level as the Liberals would've, I'm skeptical. My guess is that you could add another $1.5B to that figure based on the carbon capture alone.
Regardless though, the PCs have spent money where they said they were going to. The opposition parties all said that it was too optimistic, and maybe it was, but no matter which party won we would be looking at a deficit according to your figures.