Did Tim Hudak and Ontario's Progressive Conservatives skip math class?
The PC leader has a master's degree in economics, but sometimes it's hard to tell. Hudak has already faced plenty of criticism for employing fuzzy math in his Million Jobs Plan, but his abuse of graphs is even more concerning.
Consider Exhibit A:
While electricity rates have certainly gone up dramatically while the Liberals have been in power, Hudak and the PCs might want to consider the following.
1) Numbers on the Y axis are a good idea.
2) If you had numbers on the Y axis perhaps the tripling you speak of wouldn't look like a 10x increase.
3) Yes, 2012 was a rough year for all of us. But it happened. Stop denying it.
But let's not be too hard on the PCS. Perhaps this was simply a one off. Maybe some enterprising intern got a little too aggressive and forgot to include a source for the numbers, or, well, the numbers.
Except, consider Exhibit B.
No, this isn't some piece of rogue mail, it's front and centre on the PC website.
A quick look at the Ontario Financing Authority's website will tell you that Ontario's debt really has exploded since the Liberals came to power. According to numbers provided by RBC, the province's net debt was roughly $138 billion in 2003-2004 and is projected to rise to around $317 billion in 2016-2017 -- an approximately 2.3x increase.
And yet, the the graph on the PC website seems to show a 5x or 6x increase. Weird, right? It certainly would be easier to figure out what is going on if the graph included some numbers or a source for the data.
Ontario has serious financial problems and Hudak says he wants to tell us the truth about them. Perhaps he should start by going back to grade school and learning how to make a graph.