OTTAWA - The federal Conservatives are fighting back with some stimulus number-crunching of their own, after enduring a week of Liberal accusations of pork-barrelling.

The Conservatives are highlighting how they have spent billions of taxpayer dollars on major infrastructure projects mainly in opposition ridings rather than their own.

In charts provided to The Canadian Press, government officials note in particular that the major infrastructure component of the Building Canada program has allocated $1.4 billion to large projects in opposition ridings in Ontario, and just $436 million to Conservative ridings.

"This particular fund supports major projects, typically in major municipalities that tend to be represented by opposition members," said Chris Day, spokesman for Transport Minister John Baird.

"We have different funds for different purposes. It's wrong to highlight one fund, as the opposition has been doing, and carry that trend."

The Liberals have produced several studies of different parts of the federal government's massive stimulus program. They have concluded that the spending heavily favours Tory ridings, especially cabinet ministers.

But the Conservatives counter that the Liberal number-crunching has too many omissions to be taken at face value. There are 30 stimulus programs in the works, they say, and the Liberals have analyzed only those that serve their purposes.

Still, the Liberals and even the Parliamentary Budget Officer have complained that it's next to impossible to examine the results of the stimulus program as a whole because details are so hard to get.

Data on the major infrastructure component spending being emphasized by Baird are publicly available on government websites in a series of news releases. But it took officials in Baird's office to compile all the details and assign ridings to each project.

The major infrastructure program was actually introduced in the 2007 federal budget, and was intended to spend almost $7 billion over seven years, to be matched by provincial funding.

But when the recession hit, the government, as part of its stimulus plan, accelerated the process so the money could be pushed out as soon as possible.

Unlike the $4-billion Infrastructure Stimulus Fund, the projects don't have to be finished within two years.

Of Ontario's $2.7-billion provincial share, Ottawa has allocated $1.8 billion so far, to 25 different projects. Some of that money was allocated well before the government even suspected it would need to stimulate the economy.

But even considering only those projects that were approved since the federal budget in January, the government charts show a bias in favour of opposition ridings in Ontario.

Since January, Conservative ridings in the province have received $403.9 million in major-projects funding from Ottawa, while Opposition ridings have landed almost double that amount, at $753.9 million.

The distribution contrasts with funding under another program for recreational projects in Ontario. There, the skew favours Tory ridings, although the Tories dispute Liberal figures on the degree of the bias.

On Sunday, the Liberals rejected the Conservative analysis, saying the governing party is trying to obfuscate matters by counting money that is old and unrelated to the stimulus package.

The major infrastructure component of the Building Canada Fund "has nothing to do with the recession," Liberal MP Gerard Kennedy said in an interview.

Much of the distribution in both programs can be explained by the configuration of each party's votes in Ontario, Tories say. The Conservatives' seats in that province are more likely to be in rural areas, whereas opposition seats are mainly in urban areas.

So the major infrastructure spending, with its focus on transit, sewer systems and conference centres, is more likely to be spent in urban areas where Opposition members have the majority of seats.

And the Recreation Infrastructure program is more likely to hand the largest number of projects to expansive rural ridings, they argue.

It's a view echoed last week by Ontario Deputy Premier George Smitherman, a provincial Liberal.

"Overall, when we see ... all of the infrastructure dollars that are stimulus related, I'm pretty confident that there's going to be a very, very equitable regional distribution," he said.

The federal Liberals, meanwhile, have continued to compile data and issue accusations of bias, most recently in Northern Ontario.

They've set up a website to spread their views and remind readers about how the money is being spent -- and about the giant cheques carrying Conservative signatures and logos that the Tories have used to promote the funding.