Nevertheless, this was the trumped-up excuse for the Liberal mantra that Harper was responsible for eight straight deficits, which didn’t die out altogether even in September, when it was revealed that 2014-15 actually had a budget surplus. Trudeau looked rather like Chicken Little when the PBO came out with its own unconstrained estimate of a $1.2B surplus for 2015-16 after the election. As it turned out, the surplus would have been larger than this, nearer to $2B dollars, if the Liberal stimulus measures had not turned it into a $1B deficit. Trudeau used this ability to use the resources of the PBO to his own partisan advantage in 2015, but now wants to change the rules to prevent the Opposition from doing the same thing against him in the 2019 election.