Last week I sent a letter to local newspaper The Georgia Straight, questioning a number of statistical issues in Bill Tieleman’s column. Today, he sent me a thoughtful response, which I’ve reproduced with his permission after the jump.
We clearly disagree on a few points, but I really appreciate a journalist taking the time to reply to me (as an average citizen, not as a blogger). I write quite a few letters to the media, and their response rate (with the exception of Vancouver Sun editor Patricia Graham) is disappointing.
Bill’s responses are indented and in italics:
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.
The statistics come from the BC Teachers Federation. I am unaware of any
challenge to them from the BC government. You can see them at:
http://www.bctf.ca/action/cuts/budget/.
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.
That’s true but it doesn’t account for the number of closures and large
loss of teachers. For example, with 113 schools closing and 15,000 less students,
the average school size would have been 132.7 students each. And the Liberals
legislatively removed contract provisions restricting class size so that fewer
teachers could teach more students per class."
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.
Business immigration has dropped every year since the Liberals have been
in power and is lower in the past three years than at any point during the
NDP government period and lower than during the late Social Credit government
period from 1988 to 1991.
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.
The "potentially biased Canadian Association of Food Banks"?
What does that mean – that they inflate numbers to look good? And are you
saying that a 2.8% population growth in some way explains food bank usage
going up by three times that rate?
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.
I wrote: "Since the Liberals took office, for example, the number
of people using food banks in B.C. grew by nine percent, from 77,237 per month
in 2001 to 84,317 per month in 2004, according to the Canadian Association
of Food Banks. " That means 7,080 more food bank users per month, which
equals 9.166%, not 8.4%. Aside from statistics, I suggest you merely visit
a food back or walk around downtown if you don’t think things are getting
worse.
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%.
There’s no question food bank usage has sadly grown under both governments;
my point was to counter the unending stream of government ads and claims that
all is rosy – it is not. The NDP obviously did not deal well with this either,
despite some significant growth in real gross domestic product, such as 4.6
% in 2000, that exceeds anything to date under the Liberals.
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?
The only "gross statistical manipulations" I see are your own.
As to the FACTS you question, they are actually referenced in almost all cases,
including Statistics Canada, the OECD, Manpower Canada Inc, The FACTS are
also readily available to anyone with access to the Internet and the interest
to find them. It’s a column – take my word for it or leave it.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I’ve been doing some immigration research for a client and I worked for Immigration when I was in university, so the point about business immigrants interests me. The drop in business immigrants began around 1998, the year after Hong Kong was handed back to China. These immigrants now come from other source countries (see p. 3). Over the years, Immigration Canada has also tightened the criteria for coming to Canada as a business immigrant. You need to have a net worth of $800k and invest $400k in a business that employs at least 5 people. They’ve also upped some of the other selection criteria. It used to be much easier to qualify as a business immigrant and the regulations about what constituted a business were more lax. (It used to be possible to set up a real estate holding company, if memory serves me right.) These changes don’t have anything to do with the NDP or Liberal governments in BC. BC’s drop in business immigrants stems from global politics and national immigration regulation changes.
I suppose it’s easier for writers for publications such as the Georgia Straight to blame everything on the Liberal government… Hong Kong doesn’t enter into their editorial policy.
Tieleman shock at the suggestion that an advocacy group would manipulate numbers to advance their cause seems a little disingenous to me.