Carney’s Greatest Political Asset: Canadians—and Their Media—Who Can’t Do Math

A lot of media should go back to grade six.

Imagine you have two children. One comes home triumphantly announcing that his grades have improved by 66%. He has gone from 30% to 50%.

The other, rather sheepishly, reports an improvement of just 3.3%. His mark has risen from 90% to 93%.

You congratulate the first child on being the better student. You would, of course, have to be an idiot.

Welcome to Mark Carney’s Canada, where elementary arithmetic is apparently an endangered intellectual discipline.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne has been boasting that Canada has created almost twice as many jobs per capita as the United States. The government has repeated this comparison as evidence of its economic success.

How splendid. Except Canada’s unemployment rate is 6.5%, compared with America’s roughly 4.2%. One country has substantially more unemployment to overcome; the other is operating much closer to full employment.

And consider the conveniently neglected figures. Canada lost 110,000 jobs in August and September. Over the preceding twelve months, employment increased by a rather less triumphant 0.5%.

Then there is the government’s enthusiasm for GDP growth. Aggregate GDP is not GDP per capita. An economy can expand without making its citizens materially better off. Population growth matters, as does productivity. A rising national income tells us remarkably little unless we ask how many people must share it.

This is the peculiar genius of political half-truths. The figures need not be fabricated. They merely need to be selected, detached from context and presented to an audience unlikely to ask the next question.

And much of the Canadian media, apparently allergic to elementary numerical scrutiny, obligingly applauds.

The tragedy is not that politicians sell statistical illusions.

It’s that so few journalists bother to inspect the merchandise.