Bill, set the clock. We are counting down Tim Hudak’s MILLION JOBS PLAN.

Unveiling his opus today, Hudak showed vast improvement on his previous ventures by not falling into any ponds, making any children cry, or otherwise setting off a series of hilariously unfortunate events.

Although, at the time of writing, there are still many hours left in the day for some sort of catastrophic failure to leave the blue leader red-faced, today appears to not be an unmitigated disaster for Hudak.

Buoying his successful streak of not splitting the crotch on his pants is a reasonably intelligent platform, in the MILLION JOBS PLAN.

The long-promised scroll has finally been unveiled, and it really is, and I’ll stress this again, quite good. Mostly.

“I can remember when Ontario had the best schools, the best health care, and the best economy in the country,” writes someone pretending to be Tim Hudak in the opening salvo of the plan, before launching into a pitch to raze Alberta.

No, but, seriously folks.

Step one for Hudak involves going chop-happy on corporate tax rates. Now, Ontario’s rate is already pretty low — 11.5% generally, but as low as 4.5% if you’re a small business — and there’s a whole whack of crazy deductions and exemptions.

Hudak is vowing to “end corporation welfare,” and to forgo the “$2.5 billion corporate welfare fund,” instead opting to just cut corporate taxes. Take that, fatcats.

Except, I’m not sure I can get behind Hudak’s math. He vows to pare down business taxes by 30% — reducing the tax rate to 8%. Given that corporate taxes account for roughly $10 billion in revenue, that means he’s looking at about a $3 billion shortfall. In the costing document, the PCs only get to a $1.8 billion drop in revenue by 2017. But hey, what’s $2.2 billion between friends?

But it’s not all just tax breaks and back rubs — Edward Austerity-Hands over here has a plan to get the books balanced.

Increase class sizes, fire 9,700 non-teachers, give new civil servants second-rate pensions, kill the 30% tuition grant, remove some tax credits that go to making your homes safer, freeze public sector wages, forget about some healthcare improvements, axe the body that regulates tradespeople, get rid of energy subsidies, “focus” environmental efforts, and, well, there’s more.

Suffice it to say that Hudak is more than happy to gut the fish himself.

And that’s a good thing. Ontario has less acumen for personal finance than a drunk with a clever bookie. While some of those cuts might be a little excessive, Hudak gets points for heartless creativity.

Although the MILLION JOBS PLAN mentions the word ‘job’ 66 times, it doesn’t actually appear to note what will create jobs, or how many.

Okay, but let’s do some math here.

He’s promising more trade with the other provinces and other countries, opening up more development up North, improving congestion in the GTA, ramping-up construction, open up competition in government tendering, reduce labour laws, kick unions in the kidneys…

If you carry a few zeros…

Let’s say that’s 451,381 jobs.

Oh, but then, subtract the 100,000 public sector jobs he’s removing…

351,381. Alright. Not so bad.

But I think we’re still short.

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