During the last election, despairing fiscal conservatives searching for some sign of hope in the Liberals' seeming unconcern about the deficit convinced themselves the Grits were merely being, as it was put to me, "responsibly dishonest." Of course they don't mean a word of what they're saying, the optimists would wink. How could they? It would be the ruin of the country.

Once they're in power they'll toss it all overboard. You'll see.

How wrong they were. Do we not have it on the authority of the Prime Minister himself that the government has kept fully 78 per cent of the promises listed in the Red Book? The Liberal campaign was not, as hoped, a complete lie: just 22 per cent falsehood. At least, that's if you accept the government's figures. It's rather like one of those puzzles in logic: if there's a one-in-five chance, by the government's own admission, that it is not telling the truth, should we believe it when it claims to have told the truth the rest of the time?

Whether we should even take the Red Book, let alone the government's retroactive interpretation of it, as the definitive record of Grit promises is at best doubtful. The Red Book was the throbbing bass line of the last campaign: the melody was played on Jean Chretien's raspy pipes. Where, for example, the Red Book spoke of "replacing the GST," cleverly leaving open the possibility of replacing it with itself, Chretien vowed publicly to "scrap," even to "kill" it.

It's far from clear, indeed, whether the government should be judged simply by whether or not it kept a particular Red Book promise, even among the one Canadian in 500,000 who may have actually read the thing. The book includes among its 197 promises (the government's count) promises that are impossibly vague ("Liberals will foster increased employment without over- exploitation of resources "), promises that are wholly inadequate ("a realistic interim target for a Liberal government is to seek to reduce the federal deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by the end of the third year in office"), promises that could be read with two entirely opposite meanings ("a Liberal government will support [doubling R&D investment in Canada] only as Canada demonstrates its ability to absorb and manage such an increase") and promises that should never have been made: "federal contractors should be subject to mandatory compliance with the principles of the Employment Equity Act." It is difficult to say whether many of these promises have been kept, or whether it would matter much if they were.

In any case, the really shameless part of the Liberals' efforts to suggest their record in office bears any resemblance to the platform on which they were elected isn't the things they didn't do that they said they would, like renegotiate NAFTA or start a national daycare program: it's the things they have done of which the Red Book gives not a hint. No government can be expected to provide for every contingency, of course. But the Liberals' position on these issues was hardly a bank slate.

It is not merely that the Grits did not say before the election they would adopt the Bank of Canada's anti-inflation policy as their own: they campaigned long and hard against it. Chretien, in particular, was on record preferring that Canada's inflation rate should be kept no lower than that prevailing in the U.S., which is to say twice what it is today. Did they say anything privatizing CN, about chopping unemployment insurance benefits, about targeting Old Age Security, about cutting subsidies to farmers or VIA Rail or, bless us, the CBC? No: they railed ceaselessly against the Tories for even thinking about any of these.

Could the party really have been unaware of the depths of Canada's fiscal crisis, as it pretends? Hardly. Even allowing for Paul Martin's chicanery, the deficit they inherited, at a stated $42 billion, was $6-billion more than forecast in the last Tory budget: which is to say, the national debt stood at a staggering $508-billion, rather than a paltry $502-billion. Yet on the basis of those figures, the Red Book prescribed exactly $628-million less spending in 1997-98 than the Tories had planned. Had the Liberals stuck to their platform, program spending next year would be $128-billion, not $106- billion. Total federal borrowing would have been $55-billion higher after four years than on current projections.

Responsible dishonesty? Consider another scenario. Suppose Martin had not wasted his first budget. Suppose the deficit, instead of descending from $38- billion to 28 to 24 to 17 to 9, had marched along from 32 to 16 to zero. The national debt would be at least $68-billion lower after the Liberals' first term than is now forecast, and on the way lower. I suppose that promise will be in the next Red Book.