It was, countless pundits rushed into print to say, a referendum on tax cuts. Tired of the deep reductions in spending forced upon them by a Tory government that had deliberately starved itself of revenues, the voters turned their backs on Premier Ernie Eves and his neo-conservative ideology -- or rather that of his rival, Jim Flaherty, whose ideas were said to have been the basis of the Tories' stark, right-wing platform -- in favour of the Liberals. The Common Sense Revolution is now but a memory.

All very neat, and all quite untrue. Perhaps, one day, somebody in the Toronto media will do their homework, and look up what the fiscal record of the Tory government really was. If they do, they will find the following.

In the current fiscal year, 2003-04, the Ontario government will collect nearly $72-billion in revenues, $61-billion of it from their own sources (the rest is courtesy of the feds). That's nearly $5,000 from every one of the province's 12.2 million inhabitants in taxes and other revenues, not counting federal transfers. That's not quite a record -- at the height of the late 90s boom, the government was clearing more than $5,200 per capita, in constant (2003) dollars -- but it's more than any previous government could have dreamed of.

By way of comparison, the NDP government of the early 1990s collected less than $3,900 per capita, on average -- again, in constant dollars.

So while it is true that the Tories cut tax rates, and sharply -- especially for those on low and middle incomes -- this did not translate into less tax revenues: quite the contrary. That's partly because the economy grew so rapidly. But even when measured as a share of the economy, there has been no reduction: Own-source revenues averaged about 13% of GDP in the tax-cutting Tory years, versus 12.3% under the tax-raising NDP.

There has been no shortage of revenues, in other words. Neither has there been any shortage of spending. Total program spending this year will exceed $5,000 per capita: $5,063, to be exact. To be fair, that's about 10% less, after inflation, than it was at its peak, in the NDP's first years in office. But it's more than the Liberals ever spent during their time in power, and nobody accused them of being tightwads.

That's the record: the real, verifiable one, not the fiction that everyone prefers to believe. What about the campaign? Was this the referendum on tax cuts of so much instant history? It's hard to see how it could be, since the Tories weren't promising to cut taxes, and the Liberals weren't promising to raise them. What the Eves people offered were not tax cuts, like the broad-based reductions of the Harris years, but special tax preferences, available only to a small number of strategic political constituencies: home-owners, the elderly, parents with children in private schools.

And while the Liberals did indeed vow to revoke these if elected, you'll notice they made no mention of reversing any of the 50% cut in personal income tax rates enacted under the Harris government.

Indeed, they specifically promised not to, even signing the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's no-increase pledge. If anything, then, this election marked the ratification and entrenchment of the Harris cuts, not their rejection.

Aside from the private school tax credit, it's difficult to see what the Tory platform had to do with Jim Flaherty, or neo-conservative ideology for that matter. I know a few neo-cons: They're flat- taxers, not loophole dispensers. But even it were true that the Tories ran to the right, this was after 18 months of running hard in the opposite direction.

Until the election was called, Mr. Eves' every initiative since becoming leader seemed intended to convey a single message: The Liberals were right. His whole agenda was an apology for the Harris years. On water, on taxes, on Hydro, on any number of issues, the Eves line was the Liberal line, verbatim. Having gone to such trouble to convince the public of the error of the government's ways, his last-minute semi-conversion to the Harrisite faith could only mean one of two things: either he was sincerely mistaken, or he didn't mean a word of what he said.

Add to this the coarse, juvenile attacks on the Liberal leader, Dalton McGuinty. In substance, these were not particularly offensive. They were simply lame. Shameful as they may be, attack ads are at least supposed to work. They did in 1999, when the Tories still had some idea what they stood for: though even that year's platform was pretty thin. Compare it to the original Common Sense Revolution of 1995 -- a campaign, it is worth noting, in which the Tories used very few attack ads.

I don't wish to minimize the significance of the Liberal victory, or the praiseworthy way in which it was achieved (though I don't doubt if the contest had been any closer, we would have seen some Liberal attack ads). Perhaps the voters really meant to signal a lack of interest in smaller, less intrusive government. But until someone actually presents them with that option, we won't know for sure.