Article content continued

If you estimate it’ll take nine years for everyone to get used to the new conditions, you can get another 14,000 jobs out if it. Estimate it’ll take seven years, and you get 14,000 fewer. You have to get the number of years right. And you won’t find it in Zycher’s paper because it’s not his place as an economist to say how long the adjustment period will take, he said. He left it to the Tories.

This is counterintuitive if you aren’t an economist. It seems more plausible to calculate the eventual result of a policy change, given some basic facts about the economy you’re working with, and then try to allow for how long it might take to happen.

I put this to Zycher. He called it “intuitive musing.”

“I am rather suspicious about such models, in that usually they offer results highly sensitive to underlying assumptions,” he wrote. “I think it’s better simply to estimate a sensible economic/econometric model of the marginal impacts of a policy proposal, and then to make a conservative assumption about the adjustment period.”

When it comes to corporate taxes in particular, this approach is directly at odds with another Tory-commissioned study from the Conference Board of Canada, which concluded the party’s proposed tax cut would yield 20,500 new jobs, period. No multiplying by eight.

It also assumes throughout that the Tories actually do everything Zycher proposes and that all his other assumptions are right. Changing Ontario’s energy-generation mix is a multibillion-dollar, multi-decade project, not the simple act of ending green-energy subsidies the Tories claim. He attributes the entire gap between Ontario’s and Alberta’s per-capita economic output to regulatory differences, for instance — the word “oil” never enters the analysis. And he assumes there are no benefits from heavier regulations in one province versus another, only higher costs.

But if you’re wondering why the Tories are so committed to their platform in the face of withering criticism, it’s probably not just that they’ve lashed themselves to it and don’t know what else to do. It’s that the guy they hired to advise them says they’re right.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/davidreevely