Playing with the Numbers in BC Politics

I just sent the following letter to The Georgia Straight, in response to this column:

While I’m no champion of our provincial government, I wanted to write and take issue with Bill Tieleman’s statistic-laden column. As I’m sure you know, statistics can be bent to any point of view, and Mr. Tieleman warps his beyond recognition. To pick a couple of examples:

• Tieleman argues against the Liberals’ education program, citing 113 school closures and the elimination of 3,300 teachers. He doesn’t provide a source for these numbers. What Tieleman doesn’t say is that school enrollment has been in decline since 1998, and that there are roughly 15,000 less students in the public school system than there were in 2001.
• Laughably, Tieleman seems to blame the Liberals for the 75% fall off in business immigrants since 1993. If he read the same report I did, he’d know that the vast majority of that decline (PDF) occurred when the NDP was governing.
• Tieleman points out that under the Liberals, food bank usage has increased by 9% since 2001 (from the potentially biased Canadian Association of Food Banks). What he fails to point out is that the population of BC has grown by 2.8% in that period. Tieleman also rounds his number up to 9% from 8.4%, so the actual food bank usage increase was 5.6%, more than a third lower than what Tieleman claimed. Tieleman also fails to mention that from 1998 to 2001, when the NDP were in power, food bank usage (adjusted for population increase) grew by a whopping 14.1%.

Worryingly, Mr. Tieleman doesn’t cite his sources for a number of the statistics he labels ‘FACT’. In light of these gross statistical manipulations, are we supposed to just take his word for it?