Tim Hudak’s Million Jobs Plan gets no respect.

The Tory leader’s plan to create a million Ontario jobs over eight years has been dismissed by almost every serious analyst who has looked at it.

The most recent public opinion polls suggest that rank and file voters are equally skeptical.

Forum Research estimates that the 41 per cent of the voters now support Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals, compared to just 34 per cent who back Hudak’s Conservatives.

The Tories can probably thank the Million Jobs Plan for that. Certainly, the experts aren’t impressed.

Writing in the online publication iPolitics this week, former federal finance officials Scott Clark and Peter DeVries called the party’s platform “ridiculous.”

They said even the math was botched.

Another iPolitics writer, journalist and former NDP candidate Linda McQuaig, had the wit to interview one of the outside economists involved in Hudak’s platform.

He said he’d been asked to calculate how many jobs would be created by the Tory leader’s planned corporate tax cuts. But he had not been asked to estimate the number of jobs lost by Hudak’s proposed spending cuts.

And there’s the rub. The Tory scheme presents itself as all upside. It starts from the assumption that exactly 523,200 jobs will be created as a matter of course over the next eight years — regardless of who forms the government.

Then it carefully adds every net job that might be created by Hudak’s plan, which — among other things — would cut corporate taxes, reduce electricity rates and decimate the public service.

But the plan’s authors equally carefully fail to subtract from this total every job that might be lost through billions in proposed spending cuts.

Clark and DeVries calculate that Hudak’s plan would lead to $21 billion in cutbacks over three years. This makes his austerity scheme far tougher than that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

They predict that, if implemented, the Hudak plan would deliver a job-destroying body blow to Ontario’s already struggling economy.

On all of this, the critics are right. As a blueprint for smaller government, the Hudak plan is plausible. As a recipe for job creation, it is ludicrous.

It has been compared to former Ontario premier Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution, a platform of tax and spending cuts written for the 1995 election campaign.

But the Million Jobs Plan is far less sophisticated than Harris’s platform, which, whatever one might think of its content, was scrupulously careful in its economic analysis.

Among other things, it predicted — accurately — that Harris’ recipe of tax and spending cuts would act as a drag on the economy.

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Hudak’s platform should contain a similar buyer-beware clause. It does not. Its assertion that axing 100,000 public sector jobs will somehow increase employment is literally unbelievable.

Even the Tory leader’s otherwise sensible proposal to increase apprenticeship openings is overhyped.

Changing the rules around apprenticeships may give more young people access to the skilled trades. But by itself, it won’t create jobs for them.

Indeed, Hudak’s austerity plan would ultimately reduce job opportunities in the trades.

Does it matter that a man who could become premier is flogging a scheme that is internally incoherent?

At one level, the answer is no. Voters are notoriously casual. It is unlikely that most will get around to reading studied critiques of the Million Jobs Plan, much less unpack the econometrics behind it.

But they will come away with a notion about the Tory leader. An impression.

If the Tory campaign succeeds, this impression will be of a strong leader willing to make tough decisions.

If the Tory campaign fails, the impression will be quite different. Hudak’s single-minded platform leaves him open to the charge of being bone-headed rather than decisive – an ideologue willing to sacrifice real jobs and real services in a vain quest to pursue a goal that, at base, amounts to a chimera.

In short, the remaining weeks of this campaign are going to be fought in large part around the character of Tim Hudak. Is he a bold visionary? Or is he a dangerous buffoon?