Article content continued

Math is either right or wrong. The PCs’ math was wrong.

Naturally, the arithmetic error only goes to “competence or veracity” of the PC campaign team, to use Mr. Coyne’s words. He, Mr. Corcoran and others shift to a different question: Forgetting about the research the PCs used and how they used it, what is a reasonable estimate of the impact of the corporate income tax cut the PCs propose?

Mr. Corcoran interviewed Benjamin Zycher, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and source of the PC econometric job projections on items such as regulatory reform.

Mr. Zycher doesn’t want to move on from the numerical error point. While it was the Conference Board estimate the PCs misused with respect to the corporate income tax cut, effectively counting one job up to eight times, Mr. Zycher maintains that his job gain estimates are annual gains that can be added over a period of eight years. If the PCs had used his estimate of 14,000 jobs for the corporate income tax response, he says they would have been right in multiplying by eight to get 112,000, close to the PC projection of 119,808. The same applies for his other estimates.

But Mr. Zycher is clearly engaging in after-the-fact revisionism and misusing his own estimates. In the research the PCs commissioned from him, he writes, “The proposedreduction in the corporation income tax would increase annual Ontario GDP by about $8.4-billion, and full-time equivalent employment by about 14,000.” If he meant that it would increase full-time employment by 14,000 the first year, 28,000 the second year, 42,000 the next year and so on, he obviously should have said so.