It's Callted "Research," Michael...

Research! You would think, perhaps, that iPolitics' Michael Harris would have heard of it?

Well, if you read his most recent column with a careful eye, you may be forced to conclude that, no. He hasn't heard of it.

In something of a desperate bid to confuse the Harper governments Economic Action Plan ads for the Liberal Party's own Adscam, Harris winds up making some rather scurrilous comments about the ads:

"No one is better at giving himself straight As than this PM. The new explanation went something like this: The ads were worth it because after seeing their key message — that Canada was doing better than any other developed country in tough economic times — Canadians would burst with pride at what a good government they had.

Setting aside the neck-snapping shift in the justification, there was another problem with the ads.  They weren’t true either. Canada does not have the highest growth rate in the G7 — the United States does. Outside the G7, the economies of Australia and some Scandinavian countries also grew faster than Canada’s did."

Looking back on 2012, we can quickly see that Harris' claims here are tacitly false. The United States GDP outgrew Canada's... in the third quarter. Through the entirety of 2012, the GDP of Canada and the United States each grew at 2.1%. It took an unexpected third quarter for the US to pull even with Canada in 2012, but the shine wore off through the final quarter.

It's especially worth noting that Canada out-performed the United States in per-capita GDP growth, widely considered to be a better predictor of overall economic growth.

So in other words, Harris would have to make a single quarter a microcosm for the entirety of 2012's comparative growth, ignoring all other quarters, for Harris' claims to even seem true.

It certainly also helps that Harris is using current economic numbers -- the US has once again had a strong third quarter -- when the numbers used in the ads, aired during the 2013 NHL playoffs, were most likely from the first quarter of 2013. Canada's GDP numbers blew the US away in quarter number one. Talk about shifting the goalposts in truly epic fashion.

It's enough to make you wonder about the editing that takes place in the iPolitics offices. This is far from the first time Michael Harris has thrown caution to the wind and committed a savage burn on his oblivious readership. It's actually become quite routine.