Who Killed Canada? Election Primer Video Now Available

Debunking Mel Hurtig's Video Who Killed Canada

Hello, like many people I was also shocked when I watched the video Mel Hurtig’s video “Who killed Canada”. Before this video I was under the impression that Canada was ranked on top of the list for many of the Human Development related indexes. Actually this was one of the main reasons for me to immigrate and become a citizen of this country. After reviewing this information, I am convinced and I will also try to convince you that Canada is still top ranked most areas of social development, and therefore this video should be interpreted with many reservations.

As an engineer with 13 years in the automotive business including Quality Control area, I can say I have a lot of experience with presentations involving statistics. I also learned that there are certain principles that must be met in order to have credibility to the graphs and charts that are being presented. I am also a very critical person, so my research on internet was focused in challenging the validity of some of the arguments presented by Mel Hurtig.

My conclusion is that this presentation seems very biased towards the “bad news”. It also includes fallacies on its entire content! By fallacy I mean that even though some statistics may be true, but they seem to have been “cherry picked” and presented to us in a way that would lead the reader to infer to false conclusions.

In addition, the presentation style seems very political against the conservative group. One example of this is the “skeleton stamp”. It sounds like it is sending the message “this is the conclusion, don’t think, and let’s move to the next topic…”.

In short, after critically reviewing the information presented on this video, I am not alarmed with it anymore and neither you should be. I am not saying that you should believe on everything you see on the news or the government says… instead, you can use the same principles described below in order to challenge whatever you see, including what I am presenting here!

Below are some examples that support my statements:

1. Video webpage ()– “watch it before you vote”. This webpage shows the clear political goals of this video. You “terrorize” the population before an election, and you get more votes. It works! But it is not good for someone’s long term credibility.


2. Mel Hurtig’s resume: ( ) - shows his political path and 6 books written on the same subject. He does not seem to have a neutral point of view. This topic might one that “sells”.

3. Look at the Overall Human Development Index ) or the trends (). Canada is 4th better in the world, and it has improved since 1994!

4. Poverty level. Look at statistics in Canada (), there are many poverty indexes. The link below () shows that Canada is 4th better in the world, including OECD countries. If you look at a publication from the Fraser institute (), you can see that poverty can be measured in different ways, and that absolute poverty has declined over the last 20 years (relative poverty seems to be the same).

5. So are the statistics presented ? I cannot make that statement, because I have not found or reviewed every statistic from every year from OECD. However, I noticed that they are not shown in a transparent way, like any credible statistic is usually presented.

Some examples, taken from the webpage () are:

5.1- Distribution of wealth: on bar charts we usually keep the same size on the same chart. In this case they are divided in 20%, but only the highlighted bar shows 40%. Depending on how bars are divided it can give a false impression, leading to false conclusions. The conclusion the author wants you to draw in this case that Canada has a poor distribution of wealth.

5.2- A true assessment can be made in comparison with other countries. On this video almost all statistics are presented in comparison with OECD countries, so why wasn’t wealth distribution presented in the same way? I’d suggest that it probably shows that Canada is highly ranked, therefore this information was omitted from this video.

5.3- The OECD: now the data is presented on a list of countries. Actually there is no data, just a list, a rank, that doesn’t even show the name of the other countries. The underlined assumption is that they are all OECD “developed” countries, so Canada is performing really bad. In addition, the data doesn’t show how different they are. For instance, if they are all within 5% of each other, than the statistical conclusion may be “all countries are the same”. So why this was not presented in the same way that “distribution of wealth” bar chart was presented? A quick independent check (google “corporate taxes rank”) will give you this (http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/1471.html), indicating Canada has one of the highest corporate taxes in the world. So let’s look for OECD “corporate taxes”, the first link () takes you to the OECD page. Click on table 2.1 and you will get an Excel table. If you sort by “central government corporate income tax rate” you will find that Canada is the 24th out of the 30 OECD countries, being USA the 1st (highest) tax!!! So for the first time I am aligned with Hurtig’s numbers! however, the graph conveniently did not show who is #1 in the list, probably because it would contradict to Mel Hurtig's speech. Now, on the SAME table, if you rank by “Combined corporate income tax rate” then Canada is ranked 5th highest. So what is the difference between “central government tax” and “combined”? I have no clue, but now it seems to be clear that depending on what table you look at, you draw different conclusions. The fallacy here is the generalization, we see one statistic, we assume they are all like that. We just jump to the conclusion “Canada has low taxes on corporations”. Even worse, we take action, “let’s increase the taxes”.

I could continue to expand on this list, but I don’t have time. My point is that it is very common to see statistics that lead us to conclusions, and therefore lead us to actions. You see that everyday with health studies that one day say egg is good, another day say egg is bad for you. Who is wrong? No one is right or wrong, it depends on how you look at it! The same thing applies to the statistics presented on this video. I am a firm believer that statistics are good, but they are as credible as how they are being presented.

Thanks for your attention. Your comments are very welcome.