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The Ontario Liberals' opposition critics couldn't resist pouncing, and it was hard to blame them.

Here's a government that keeps boasting about meeting or beating its deficit targets, the Progressive Conservatives crowed, and yet the budget tabled on Thursday shows the shortfall actually going up from $9.8-billion in 2012-13 to $11.7-billion in the current fiscal year. What kind of restraint is that?

It's unlikely the deficit will actually go up that much, if at all, and the Tories probably knew it. But consider it comeuppance for the Liberals' shenanigans in trying to boost their credibility as deficit slayers.

Under-promising and over-delivering on budget projections is a time-honoured trick, honed by Paul Martin when he was federal finance minister, and former provincial treasurer Dwight Duncan – a disciple of Mr. Martin's – played it almost to perfection. After Ontario plunged back into red ink following the 2008 economic crash, Mr. Duncan consistently set pessimistic forecasts for how much of it he could make disappear, then boasted that unlike other governments – the one in Ottawa, for instance – his was consistently beating its projections.

In the past year, though, two things happened that led even some Liberals to worry heading into this year's budget that the extent to which they were ahead of supposed pace could actually be problematic.

First, the government beat its earlier 2012-13 projection of $14.8-billion even more than it seemed to originally hope or expect, in part because of savings from wage restraint and other measures that were more one-offs than the sorts of things that would show year-to-year progress.

Second, Mr. Duncan was replaced as finance minister by Charles Sousa, who is not nearly as adept as Mr. Duncan at delivering a simple message.

Answering reporters' questions about the budget he tabled on Thursday, Mr. Sousa could have offered a fairly straightforward explanation for why the deficit was predicted to go up again. For instance: "It went down last year because we achieved more savings than we expected. Of course, I hope we're able to beat our targets again this year, and we'll do our best. But we'd rather err on the safe side so that we don't let down people who are counting on us, maybe because of economic trends beyond our control."

Instead, Mr. Sousa managed to tie himself in knots discussing different years' numbers, to the extent that nobody could quite understand the point he was trying to make, and his opponents had free rein to make it for him.

Mr. Sousa is considerably more earnest than his predecessor, so perhaps he didn't deserve to be stuck in this awkward situation. And really, it's mostly harmless to say the deficit will be higher than it winds up; in terms of the province's fiscal interests, particularly how it's viewed by credit raters, it's certainly better than the other way around.

The one real danger is more about perceptions within the government itself than among the general public. Many Liberals have chafed at the belt-tightening of the past couple of years, and thought the likes of Mr. Duncan and former premier Dalton McGuinty got a little too evangelical about austerity. That the numbers keep going down faster than predicted can make still very large ones (like $9.8-billion) seem less deserving of attention than they really are.

As for what happened on Thursday, there was a degree of poetic justice in the Liberals – who at points have taken pleasure in picking their highest projections and lowest real figures and highlighting the gaps between the two – having their fun with numbers catch up with them.

Adam Radwanski is a columnist covering Ontario politics.

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