When I first heard about the Million Jobs Plan, I thought it was an interesting gimmick. In age of short attention spans, people remember those snappy zingers – Nova Scotia’s recent election featured a million population pledge. Hudak was claiming it had been done in the 1990s and we’ll do it again!
He should have just stuck to the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) principle. We did it before and we can do it again would have been good enough.
I do economic impact analyses for a living. They can be complex – person years, FTEs, jobs, annual jobs, total jobs over the life of the project, displaced jobs – it’s complicated. In addition, when an organization is forecasting the employment impacts of things like tax cuts, you are opening up a Pandora’s box of debate.
If he had just kept it simple.
Between 1995 and 2001, under Harris, the Ontario economy created 820,000 net new jobs according to the LFS. That is a 16.1 percent growth rate.
In 2013, there were 6.88 million people working in Ontario according to the LFS. If you apply a 16.1% growth rate over the next six years (I think Hudak gave himself seven years?) you end up with 1.1 million net new jobs.
The Million Jobs Plan. We did it before. We’ll do it again.
Instead, he got cute and now he is mired in a credibility mess.