Math Challenged

Over the weekend, it emerged that Ontario's NDP had made an error when costing the party's platform. Adam Radwanski writes:

As Ontarians were settling into their long weekends, perhaps discussing among themselves whether they should for once consider voting for an NDP government on June 7, news came of a very basic math error in the party’s platform – one that meant it had accidentally low-balled its deficit projections by $1.4-billion annually.

Doug Ford has been announcing all kinds of tax cuts. But he has refused to release a costed platform:

The Tories have been more quiet than one might expect of a party with a reputation for fiscal hawkishness. Possibly that has something to do with Mr. Ford declining to present a costed platform, nor even to detail a single cost-saving proposal while promising many billions of dollars in new expenditures and tax cuts. 

And  Kathleen Wynne is at odds with the auditor general, who claims the Liberals have significantly underestimated their projected deficit:

Enter Ms. Wynne’s Liberals, who have made a more concerted effort to highlight the NDP’s bad arithmetic. The governing party, now running third, is in a continuing battle with the province’s Auditor-General, who accuses it of low-balling deficit projections by about $5-billion. That may be more a dispute over accounting practices than a math mistake, but it makes for an easy NDP rebuttal when the Liberals go after them – as does a general sense that the Liberals have managed finances in recent years more to meet political imperatives than out of any great responsibility to the bottom line.

It would appear that all three parties are math challenged. The numbers are supposed to tell the story. But whose numbers do you believe?

Image: kidsarithmatic.com