Good business and bad numbers make for short relationships.
But there are a lot of those unsavoury couplings occurring these days.
Might as well kick off with the weather, which is where most things start and end.
As mentioned in previous Public Offerings, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its findings, upon which much of the man-made global warming industry has been based, have been exposed as agents of political advocacy rather than scientific integrity. You can’t sell much environmental sizzle when the steak is not up to the job. So the IPCC’s numbers put the required meat on the bone. Its intentions might have been good, but its numbers weren’t.
“Deniers” of the warming gospel were eventually heard above the choir of the converted. The most recent result is a report by the InterAcademy Council, an international science organization. It conceded that the IPCC is not a purely scientific entity, pointed to its “slow and inadequate response to revelations of errors” and advised that “stronger enforcement of IPCC review procedures” could go a long way to minimizing the number of those errors.
Among the council’s other recommendations: a conflict-of-interest policy for all IPCC leaders, authors, reviewers and staff and inclusion on the IPCC’s executive committee of people from “outside the IPCC or even outside the climate science community.”
In other words, let’s get the numbers right, let’s tell more than one side of the story and let’s at least attempt to ensure that science remains focused on finding truths rather than advancing political objectives.
But bad numbers go well beyond the weather.
In B.C. they’re all over the shop.
The Vancouver Board of Trade, in an admirable initiative to secure accurate crime victimization surveys for the city, cited StatsCan surveys showing that only about one-third of crime is reported to police.
The man on the street busily digesting IPCC spin might well wonder how StatsCan can measure the unrecorded and conclude that close to two-thirds of crime is not reported to the police.
But the biggest lightning rod for politically incubated numbers in B.C. these days is the HST.
They triggered the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association air raid siren earlier in the summer.
Its July online membership poll confirmed in service industry minds that the HST had inflicted mortal wounds to restaurants all over B.C. just as the association’s braintrust had predicted. But more figures released later from the StatsCan vaults revealed that sales in the food services industry were also down in June, prior to the HST being instituted. So maybe there’s more to slow dining numbers than the HST devil: expensive meals, poor service, pedestrian menus?
There’s no doubt here that the single value-added tax will be better for the economy in the long run than its two-headed predecessor, but the Liberals’ HST delivery, which apparently bet big on the ask-for-forgiveness-rather-than-seek-permission approach, has been such a cock-up that it and the party are headed for a severe caning in the next election or in any HST referendum.
It’s a good thing school’s back in session. There are obviously a lot of candidates for remedial math classes in B.C.