I know it’s exceptionally nerdy, but I highly recommend the experience of reading a new law’s regulatory impact statement, for no other reason than to get a taste of the sheer absurdity of government these days.

Take the regulations on the new Apprentice Loan Act. The executive summary on the cost-benefit of the program (scroll down a bit) reads as follows:

The Canada Apprentice Loan (CAL) will cost the Government of Canada (GoC) $74 million over 10 years, from 2014–15 to 2023–24. Benefits include income gains for additional apprentice completers as a result of the CAL. If a 10 percentage point increase in the completion rate due to the CAL were assumed, this would yield income gains of $185 million over 10 years, and net benefits to Canadians of $111 million.

The key word in that sentence is “assumed”. Or, in other words: they plucked some numbers out of the air to make the program look plausible.

To be fair to the folks who wrote this, there’s no good data available as to the likely impact apprentice loans might have on completion. There would be if the government had, at any time in the past six years, evaluated the effect of the Apprenticeship Incentive or Completion Grants, or the Tradesperson’s Tool Deduction. But the government hasn’t done any of this, so “assuming” numbers may have been the only way to go.

Another highly amusing aspect of the regulatory statement is the rationale for the program’s borrowing limit of $4,000/period of technical training. Supposedly, it’s equivalent to an apprentice’s lost earnings during a technical training period, but no source for the figure is given.

In all the largest occupational categories, the usual technical training period is 8 weeks. At a fairly generous estimate of $17/hr and 40 hours per week, the implied loss in gross earnings is about $5,440, with a net earnings loss of between $4,000 and $4,500, depending on what province you’re in. So the estimate is probably right, right?

Wrong. That math only works if you assume the apprentice does not receive EI during technical training. Once EI is factored in, apprentices would need to be making $25/hour in order to be losing $4,000 in wages per technical training period. Let me assure you: apprentices are not making $25/hour.

How could anyone make such errors, you ask? Simple: they aren’t errors. Nobody actually believes these numbers. They’re just made-up after the fact to provide cover for a decision that was made with an eye toward placating constituencies (read: construction companies) rather than addressing a real problem. It’s what happens when policy is made on the fly, and the public service isn’t asked for input until after budget night.

Some of you may read this and think: “Aha! Tory perfidy!” But resist that impulse if you can. Harper’s government is hardly the only one that does this kind of thing: the Ontario Liberals’ 30% Tuition Grant is a far more egregious example of the same process, and a more expensive one too. The OTG costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year, where the Apprentice Loans are projected to cost just $7 million/year (yes, yes, the budget said it would cost $25 million/year – now they’ve decided it will be less).

The real problem is that when Canadian governments of any stripe want to claim they’re “doing something” about education, they simply start writing cheques to learners (or their parents) and Hey, Presto! Problem solved! But the only “problem” this solves is the perception that governments aren’t doing anything about education.  Improving education – actually making a difference in terms of completion rates, or graduate quality, or what have you – that takes work. That takes thought. That requires politicians to concentrate for more than a couple of hours.

Most of all, it requires investments in institutions. And increasingly, governments seem reluctant to make those investments.