Pressing people’s buttons is unsavoury on the stump. But pulling the wool over their eyes is no less unsettling.

Even if Tory Leader Tim Hudak has belatedly dialed down his ethnic-baiting campaign speeches, and is changing the channel back to his Changebook platform, he still has a lot of explaining to do.

All platforms take shortcuts to win votes, but these Progressive Conservative planks truly lack timber. Changebook takes a U-turn back to a retro Ontario — an economic and social dead end.

It simply doesn’t add up. But I’ll let Hudak’s talking points speak for themselves to show how he’s taking us all for a ride on the campaign trail.

In suburban Ottawa, he held court in the bucolic backyard of a retired Tory partisan, who nodded enthusiastically as the PC leader promised to cancel the DRC — the obscure Debt Retirement Charge that pays down the liabilities of the old Ontario Hydro. This sham promise boils down to pretending we’ve already retired the debt, merely because we’ve collected the principal amount — overlooking the minor matter of interest payments still outstanding (as anyone with a mortgage well knows).

The debt remains on the books, but the Tories (who dreamed up the DRC) would magically transfer the burden from ratepayers to taxpayers. I call it the “forgive and forget” approach to debt — a blatant shell game.

Hudak bemoaned the plight of seniors who stay up late to do the laundry because of “mandatory smart meter tax machines” (better known as time-of-use pricing). In fact, off-peak rates kick in at 7 p.m., well before the bedtime of his host at that day’s campaign stop, Don Blair. In fact, there’s no assurance Blair’s bill would be any lower if Hudak took power, apart from his promise to remove the provincial portion of the supposedly diabolical HST — while conveniently keeping it on everything else.

As the Tory leader departed, Blair boasted to me that as a retired Bay St. stockbroker he knew a good deal when he saw one. I’m just not so sure it’s a smart investment for the province.

The trouble with Changebook is that it tries to buy voters with their own (tax) money, relying on gimmicks such as the DRC and HST givebacks instead of making productive investments. It hearkens back to a simpler time, pretending we can punish prisoners with a variation of chain gangs from 1950s-era Alabama.

But Changebook goes beyond oversimplification to outright manipulation, which had escaped my notice until labour economist Jim Stanford shared his research with me the other day. Stanford is hardly a disinterested observer — he works for the Canadian Auto Workers — but he is a widely respected analyst.

His exposé, to be released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (a lefty think tank), shows how the data and charts in Changebook cross the line of truthfulness and accuracy, misstating Ontario’s economic situation, hydro rate hikes and the rising debt. It documents the deception on a scale that would embarrass any first-year economics student, let alone someone like Hudak with a masters in economics.

The graphs “consistently mislead the reader … reflect a consistent willingness to bend the statistical truth, and a disrespect for normal standards of honesty and transparency in written work,” Stanford concludes. A chart understating the economic recovery “is not just manipulative in its presentation; it is explicitly false.”

Will Toronto voters buy it? That depends on whether they’re feeling buyer’s remorse after the bait and switch tactics of another populist politician, Rob Ford, who famously pledged during his mayoral campaign to “end the gravy train” without weakening services.

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A year after Ford’s triumph, Hudak’s pocketbook pitch makes a similar promise to cut taxes without touching health or education. In contrast to his ethnic baiting, I’d call this bait and Changebook.

Martin Regg Cohn’sprovincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca, twitter.com/reggcohn.