Member of Provincial Parliament
Mississauga-Streetsville Provincial Liberal Association
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Hudak's house-of-cards platform crumbling quickly
The first indication of problems for the Tories came on the street in the heat of the summer. The most common comment about the Conservative policy platform from homes where self-professed Conservatives lived was, "Hudak's an idiot." It was growled out in anger, anger not at our governing Liberals, but anger at how the Conservative dynasty of 42 years, through such Premiers as George Drew, Leslie Frost, John Robarts and Bill Davis had been reduced to this Tea Party shell of a far-right-wing protest movement.
The polls caught up next. The last three polls, as of September 12th, have shown the Liberals ahead and climbing; the PCs second and falling. The polls are accurate, and worse lies ahead for the Conservatives, as any canvasser (ours or theirs) can tell you.
Now the journalists are paying attention. The Toronto Star's Martin Regg Cohn ripped into Hudak's often silly, hopelessly misleading and inaccurate policy document, calling Hudak's pledge to dump the remaining $13.8 billion hydro debt onto taxpayers "a shell game," and stating that Hudak's "Changebook goes beyond oversimplification to outright manipulation."
A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives carves up Hudak's misleading charts in his policy document. This is a great read. Author Jim Stanford says of the charts in Hudak's changebook that "not one of the 13 graphs conforms to the standards of presentation that are normally required of statistical presentations in academic and professional practice. In at least three cases, the data presented in the graphs is actually false." Oops. Looks like the teacher caught Hudak doing the kind of thing that gets high school students a zero on the assignment and a detention.
Writes Stanford, "There are 13 statistical graphs contained in the changebook. Shockingly, it turned out that every one of them revealed significant errors in labelling, citation, scaling, and proportion. In a few cases the illustrated data is simply wrong. In almost all of the 13 graphs, axes and scaling have been skewed and manipulated, without proper labelling, in order to exaggerate political points. In numerous cases, the proportion of bars or other features is internally inconsistent. In some cases, it appears that the graphs were simply hand-drawn by a graphical designer (rather than being plotted quantitatively, whether by hand or computer), quite likely on the basis of numbers that were simply made up."
If you have not yet clicked the link above, now would be a good time.