It is hard to decide which of this week's televised spectaculars was the more compelling viewing: Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard's attempt to pull a consensus on the economy out of a room full of mutually hostile interest groups, or B.C. Premier Glen Clark's bold suggestion that a balanced budget before the last election that became a $1-billion deficit after the election is no more than normal statistical error.

There are few sights in life more poignant than a politician caught in a lie, and the lie that both these gentlemen saw fit to impress upon their electorates is this: that the province in which they lived, by virtue of its uniqueness upon God's earth, had been exempted from the laws of economics, not to say arithmetic.

Clark's position is perhaps the more excruciating: having had the good fortune to lose the referendum, Premier Bouchard is not forced to explain to Quebecers why all the miraculous benefits that were said to flow from sovereignty have not in fact materialized. But then, a good part of the reason for sovereignty was supposed to be a fundamental difference in values between Quebec and the rest of North America, over much of which a "right-wing wind" was said to be blowing. Let other provinces cut spending, he would say: in Quebec, we are different.

Which of course, is just what Premier Clark said. Mindful of the demise of Ontario's NDP government, which after doubling the province's debt in the space of four years had been so foolish as to confess the need to rein in spending, Clark bet his campaign on the opposite tactic: rather than concede the terms of debate to his opponents, Clark would take a stand against cutting spending, resolutely and without apology, even in the face of the province's own rapidly rising debts. Let others go that road, the premier roared: B.C. is different.

He was at it again the other night in his address to the province, still without apology, still insisting that B.C. had "a different vision." Perhaps at that he has a point. Among the 75 per cent of British Columbians who now say they believe the NDP lied about the state of the province's finances during the election, a proposition for which there is a drawerful of documentation, there must necessarily be a good proportion of the 39 per cent who voted for the party at the time. If they say they are now shocked to find that B.C. has a deficit, well, so is the premier.

The evidence of B.C.'s coming fiscal crisis, that is, was there for anyone who had eyes to see. In the last 10 years, the province doubled program spending: an average annual increase of 7 per cent. It has only been able to keep the deficit in check by more than doubling tax revenues. That kind of revenue growth might have just been possible so long as the province had the fastest growing economy in the nation. But did anyone really believe this could carry on forever?

Apparently so, or how else to explain why such currency was attached to the NDP's pre-election claims to have eliminated the province's deficit: whether or not they were cooking the books, they'd have to have been building missile systems not to have balanced the budget, with the kind of sustained economic boom B.C. had enjoyed until then.

Indeed, it is a striking paradox that the two provinces having the most evident difficulty in balancing their books are the two, depending how you measure these things, with the highest taxes: B.C. has the highest marginal tax rate on personal income, at a top rate, federal and provincial combined, of 54 per cent; Quebec has the highest overall tax burden, and easily the highest tax rates on middle-income earners. The latter can at least complain of sluggish economic growth, leaving aside for the moment the contribution of high taxes to that result. B.C., for its part, has more grounds to complain of reductions in federal transfers, even if some of these, as in the case of the welfare residency requirement, are self-inflicted.

Yet neither can truthfully claim an insufficiency of revenues as the source of its fiscal woes. And for all the scorn now being heaped upon Bouchard and Clark, neither can the fault be laid entirely at the feet of political leaders.

The fault lies rather with an electorate that was in each case too willing to believe it need not make the tough choices that others had been called to make, too ready to listen to those who pretend to have found another way, too blessedly in love with their own uniqueness.