OTTAWA - Though we’ve got more than 120 days to go until the election, political parties are already crowding the airwaves with ads.

In the NDP ad, Thomas Mulcair is in a coffee shop warmly telling us he’ll fight for the middle class. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is in someone’s living room explaining how families will do better under his plan.

The Conservatives have two ads running. One has Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his office, working late to protect us from terrorists and protect our economy from Mulcair and Trudeau. In the other, some human resources committee is concluding that while Trudeau might one day be ready to succeed Harper, today is not that day.

But eagle-eyed TV viewers may have seen a new political ad on the tube this weekend attacking Harper and it’s not from one of this fall’s combatants.

It’s from a group called Engage Canada.

Engage Canada is a new non-profit bankrolled by a variety of union and progressive groups run by former top aides to Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty and the late NDP Leader Jack Layton.

They don’t like Harper and they don’t like Conservatives. And, by the evidence of their first ad, they don't much care for the truth.

Their first 30-second TV spot begins: “Under the Conservatives, inequality is skyrocketing. Income for the wealthiest 5% is increasing 12 times faster than for the rest of Canadians.”

But that’s not true. To make this claim, Engage Canada used a yardstick that omits income millions of us get from old age security, EI, welfare payments and other government transfers, including refundable tax credits.

The better yardstick is one one that includes all income — pensions, transfers, tax credits, capital gains — and then subtracts taxes paid to federal and provincial governments.

Use that more reasonable yardstick and the wealthiest are actually worse off. The rich have seen total after-tax income rise 15.9% from 2006 to 2012. The rest of us saw total after-tax income grow 17% over the same period.

Then Engage Canada gives us two more nose-stretchers, claiming the Harper Conservatives have made “no new investment for jobs” and that they’ve made “cuts to economic development.” That’s demonstrably wrong.

The 2015 budget was filled with new money for both jobs and economic development.

Sure, the six regional economic development agencies had some budget cuts, but when Harper started in 2006 there were only four regional economic development agencies. Harper’s created two new ones, each of which gets hundreds of millions of new dollars to spend on economic development. So overall, we’re spending way more — some say, too much more — on regional economic development.

On top of that, Ottawa is spending lots outside of those agencies on economic development and jobs. The billions we will spend on the navy shipbuilding strategy alone is a good example.

One could argue these are ineffective investments but it’s a lie to say there are “no new investments” or “cuts.”

And then the ad closes with the biggest whopper of them all: “A $36 billion cut to health care.”

Here’s what is really happening to federal health care transfers. Provinces will get 6% more — more! — cash for health care this year and 6% more — more! — next year. Then, they’ll be guaranteed an increase — an increase, not a cut! — of at least the cost of inflation or 3% a year — whichever is more. So from 2018 on, no province will ever get less than a 3% hike in federal transfers for health care.

Is an increase of 3% a year enough? Maybe not. But you sure as heck cannot call an annual increase a cut. If you do, you’re telling a fib.

The irony here is that progressive groups are constantly calling out the Harper Conservatives for failing to implement “evidence-based” policies, for ignoring the facts in favour of ideology.

Well, if this debut from this umbrella group of progressive, anti-Harper groups hopes to have any credibility, they might find some other datapoints to use to beat up the Conservatives.

Because right now, Engage Canada is wilfully burying evidence in favour of ideology. And I’m pretty sure progressives are fighting to elect a government that places evidence ahead of ideology.