The public accounts for last year now disclose that CRF income actually was $28.570 billion -- a discrepancy of $2.558 billion from Hansen's pre-election forecast.

That's $568 for every man, woman and child living in British Columbia.

(And that's after an end-of-the-year, last-minute $250 million gift from Ottawa to help Victoria make the transition to the Harmonized Sales Tax.)

Four times the 'fudge'

Looked at another way, it is evident that Campbell, Hansen and the BC Liberal government overstated Victoria's pre-election CRF revenues by more than eight per cent.

By comparison, the notorious NDP "Fudge-it Budgets" of the mid-1990s saw Glen Clark's government inflate CRF receipts -- with so-called "revenue optimism" -- by a relatively puny one-to-two per cent.

Nearly every British Columbian of voting age and above probably remembers the outcry sparked by those fudged fiscal plans for 1995/96 and 1996/97.

A group of outraged citizens, led by David Stockell of Kelowna (and financially supported by the National Citizens Coalition), commenced a legal action in B.C. Supreme Court against a trio of NDP MLAs, alleging that their party had won the 1996 general election by "fraud." (Several years later, in 2000, the court rendered a verdict of acquittal.)

In Victoria, the province's auditor general launched a review of the entire budget-making process, and subsequently issued a report that described as "inappropriate" the New Democrats' arbitrary boosting of certain revenues.

Perhaps no group was more outraged by the Clark government's budgets than the provincial news media.

In his book, Barbarians in the Garden City, a screed that alleged the New Democratic Party in the 1990s had turned British Columbia into the "village idiot of Confederation," author Mark Milke wrote of "the 1,000 documents released in 1996 after the Vancouver Sun used freedom of information laws to dig through the government's Maginot line of political spin."

Has anyone seen anything close to a comparable effort by the Sun to get at the "truth" in the many months following Hansen's fudge-packed, pre-election fiscal plan?

BC's media spins the opposite

Tyee readers will be shocked to know that Thursday's release of the 2009/10 public accounts garnered little criticism from B.C.'s mainstream news media.

In fact, rather than acknowledging the historic size of the pre-election fudge larded-out by Campbell and the Liberals in early 2009, the provincial media strove to praise the government's ability to record a smaller-than-expected shortfall in tough economic times.

"B.C. deficit projection shrinks by $1-billion" was the headline on a Globe and Mail story, while "B.C. deficit $1 billion lower than projected for 2009-10" ran above a report in the Vancouver Sun.

"Drastic spending cuts reduce B.C. deficit by $996 million, province says" read the headline for an analysis in the Victoria Times-Colonist, which was nearly-identical to the headline on an unsigned piece on the CBC's website: "Spending cuts reduce B.C. deficit by $1B."

At Vancouver radio station NEWS 1130, the take was "B.C. deficit $1 billion smaller."

Never mind election pledges

Nope. For B.C.'s mainstream news media, Hansen's pre-election budget no longer is relevant.

That's because in September 2009, just three-and-a-half months after Campbell and the BC Liberals won re-election to government, Hansen introduced a follow-up fiscal plan that showed a post-election shortfall of $2.8 billion.

And for the media, that September re-write became the new benchmark -- especially when the government's Public Affairs Bureau guided their thoughts with a misleading news release to announce publication of the public accounts.

"B.C. Public Accounts Show Prudent Fiscal Management," gloated the news release headline, with text below announcing "a smaller deficit than forecast."

It seems obvious that most mainstream reporters simply re-wrote the PAB spin without bothering to consult or examine either the actual public accounts or the pre-election budget.

As for legal action by concerned citizens, or a full-blown review by the auditor general, well ... don't hold your breath.

B.C.'s 2009/10 public accounts reveal a massive and historic misrepresentation of the province's finances by Gordon Campbell's BC Liberal government on the eve of the 2009 general election. But it's news that's likely to remain unknown by most British Columbians, while the public accounts themselves are ignored on the musty shelves of the legislative library.