Wandering through the local library the other day, I noticed a familiar sight. To my left, a mother was hunched over her young child’s shoulder, both attempting to work their way through a series of basic math problems.
The child, who couldn’t have been older than eight, was clearly frustrated and you could tell Mom’s patience was being tested.
“Why do I need to know math?” the little boy grumbled as Mom tapped her pencil impatiently on the page in front of them.
Read Also
Surviving a bad harvest day sometimes requires a little luck
Producer and writer Kevin Hursh shares a day of three potentially disastrous incidents as cautionary tales of farm safety for Prairie farmers in the midst of fall harvest work.
“Because numbers matter,” was Mom’s reply as she tucked the yellow pencil back into her child’s clenched fist.
Like many Canadians, my relationship with math is rocky at the best of times.
Still, I’ve always had a profound respect for numbers. They are, in some ways, more powerful than words.
Unlike words, numbers can single handedly discredit an argument, strengthen a claim or change a person’s mind.
Numbers can also mould myth into fact. Just ask Canadian dairy farmers, who are still trying to counter the belief milk is significantly cheaper in the United States. (It’s not, but that’s another story.)
Politics, and politicians, love numbers. At every opportunity, statistics, figures and data tables are plopped into speeches, reports and testimonials. Nowhere is this practice more obvious than on the campaign trail, where voters are inundated with lofty job gains, promises of lower taxes and massive financial commitments.
Consider, for a moment, the current Ontario election. Not a day goes by in which Conservative leader Tim Hudak, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne and/or NDP leader Andrea Horwath doesn’t launch into a speech dripping with figures.
Remember, Wynne’s entire platform is based almost entirely on a defeated budget. Tim Hudak, meanwhile, insists on creating a million jobs for Ontarians while firing 100,000 public servants at the same time.
It’s not that numbers shouldn’t be part of political campaigns. They should. The problem today is that the numbers don’t add up.
Gone are the days where numbers had to make sense, where statistics and basic math went hand-in-hand.
Now, it seems, the person with the most arbitrary number wins. A million jobs sounds good. It’s catchy, flashy and an easy sound bite, one that can be plugged universally at campaign stops across the province.
Too bad several high profile economists have accused the Tories of inflating the numbers.
The plan, economists argue, is seriously flawed. The Tory jobs platform is based on two reports: one from the Conference Board of Canada and the other from an economist hired by the party.
All well and good, except for the fact that the Tories substituted the “person years of employment” numbers for actual jobs so the plan counts each job eight times over.
The result is a deeply flawed campaign cornerstone, which is only made worse given that Hudak has a master’s degree in economics.
The Tory jobs gaffe, though, is only one of several math glitches to make its way into the political spotlight in recent months.
Here in Ottawa, the Harper Conservatives were repeatedly accused of exaggerating the number of cases of voter fraud during debate on the highly controversial Fair Elections Act.
Even agriculture, an industry known for its precise yield and acreage data, was faced with a numbers glitch last winter as the federal government, including agriculture minister Gerry Ritz, and grain companies accused the railways of fudging car allocations.
Everyone knows politics is a numbers game, where those with the most seats and the highest number of votes win.
The math, though, needs to be easy to follow. Tossing numbers around for the sake of tossing around numbers only serves to confuse voters. Too many math errors, fuzzy numbers or calculations pulled out of thin air risks frustrating people so much that they just stay home on election day.
Low voter turnout defeats the purpose of campaigning on numbers in the first place. At the end of the day, the number of votes cast is the most important number of them all.
