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The first rule of opposition politics is to draw contrasts with the government in the most extreme manner possible.

Pierre Poilievre is so wed to the game plan, he adhered to it even when he was a minister.

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On Sunday, the Conservative finance critic accused the Liberals of engaging in “a gigantic experiment in freakonomics” — the study of incentives to figure out behaviour.

He said the government’s emergency benefits package is having the opposite impact to its intended effect — acting not as a stimulus to economic activity but as a “tranquilizer,” by punishing people for working. He offered the examples of students and minimum wage workers who have been “banned from working” by generous but inflexible benefits.

Poilievre may have embroidered here and embellished there, but he’s not wrong.

A new report by a working group of some of Canada’s best economic thinkers at the C.D. Howe Institute revealed a similar if more soberly expressed disquiet with the way the government has responded to the crash in household income.