Debt is not a bad thing if managed properly and part of a "balanced" budget, be it a family budget, corporate budget or a provincial budget, is to manage debt. Since we're ending things off with a surplus this means we're paying off our debts and spending our money wisely ...most of the time.
This commits the fallacy of thinking that Government is a household. It isn't.
A government sovereign in it's own currency, such as the Federal government of Canada, can never be insolvent in that currency. It does not spend out of tax revenus but by direct money creation. It can always purchase anything for sale in it's own currency. It does not need to borrow to run a deficit.
Provinces are more like households because they do need to spend from tax revenue. But there are many ways in which the constraints that apply to households do not apply to them in the same way.
How a government can rationally say they are in surplus by four hundred million dollars when the overall debt has risen by over a billion dollars in the same period, however, is not easily apparent. Boasting about a "surplus" in such circumstances is simply lying.
Having pointed this out I will, for the sake of argument, go back to your "household" analogy for the rest of this post, because I think that your argument fails even on that assumption.
So, if we accept the "household" analogy as you seem to, this is llike a household borrowing ten thousand dollars in a year, putting $5,000 of that into a savings account and spending the rest on parties, and then claiming that it is $5,000.00 richer than it was at the start of the year! I don't think an accountant would be impressed by that claim...
The focus of governments on the allegedly "balanced" budget is basically meaningless. When at the same time people are without jobs and children are trapped in poverty there is no real "surplus" in any meaningful sense.
Now, if the government takes in more taxes than it spends this must mean, ipso facto, that the rest of us are in deficit to the exact same amount that the government is in "surplus".
A government surplus is a private sector deficit. A four hundred million dollar "surplus" means, all other things being equal, that the rest of us are in a four hundred million dollar deficit.
The only justification for that would be that the government is going to use it to pay down our debt. But they aren't paying it down, they are increasing it at record rates. Good "fiscal management"? Gimme a break!