It really is as simple as that. Every estimate of "job creation" that has ever been claimed on behalf of some scheme to redirect funds from one part of the economy to the other was derived in the same way: by totting up the number of those newly employed in the latter, while ignoring altogether those who will not be employed in the former. And why not? It works every time. Everyone looks at the mountain; no one remembers the hole.

So we come to perhaps the most skilled practitioner of this black art in politics today, the premier of British Columbia, Glen Clark. The premier's latest bit of misdirection, his grandly named "Jobs and Timber Accord," is also his most ambitious: at his urging, according to the premier, the forest industry has agreed to create almost 40,000 jobs, "directly and indirectly," over the next four years. That the industry has not agreed to do anything of the kind is almost beside the point. Ignore all the weasel words and statistical dodges, and you still are left with a mountain of transparent economic folderol.

It starts with the assumption, explicit throughout, that the purpose of economic life is not to produce useful goods and services to exchange with each other, but to "create jobs." The 17 large forestry firms that signed the accord may have thought they were in the business of cutting and selling timber for profit; as of now, they have been conscripted into the "job creation" trade. At best, this is pointless: the industry will be compelled to hire people it would already have hired on its own. At worst, it is a prescription for overmanning -- and its inevitable corollary, fewer jobs elsewhere in the economy.

We can discard outright the 17,000 "indirect" of "spinoff" jobs that the premier claims for his plan. Everything in the economy, every industry, every job, every expenditure, generates its own "spinoff" effects. If you left $1.5-billion in cash at the corner of Howe and Robson, it would undoubtedly produce untold numbers of "spinoff" jobs as its lucky discoverers spent their windfall. It would still be a silly waste of public funds.

More defensible is the pledge to spend $300-million a year out of the province's Forest Renewal B.C. fund on measures to replant and replenish forest lands. It's only money that was taken from the industry to begin with, after all, in the form of increased stumpage fees. Since the whole purpose of the fees, like any price, is to capture the true economic cost of logging -- including the cost of replanting -- this is only sensible.

(Of course, if that is the objective, there's a much simpler way of going about it than this sort of elaborate giving with one hand what was taken with the other. Were forest lands privately owned, as in the Scandinavian countries, logging firms would have an incentive to treat the timber as a capital asset, with an economic value worth maintaining, rather than as a cut-and-run operating expense.)

In any case, it hardly counts as job creation. The 5,000 jobs the extra spending will create just about matches the number of jobs the industry has lost in recent years as taxes rose. What potential there might have been for a net increase in employment vanished, moreover, with the decision to make a gift of the newly hired reforestation workers to the Industrial Wood and Allied Workers of Canada. At union scale, many fewer jobs will be created.

Which means fewer trees will be planted. Which means fewer people will be employed to cut them down.

After that, things get positively loopy. The plan calls for lumber firms to divert at least one-sixth of sawn timber to the province's manufacturers of wood products, an increase of about 70 per cent from present levels.

Allegedly this would create another 5,000 jobs. The premier is apparently scandalized that this lumber is being exported for sale to manufacturers abroad; a government background paper complains "this wood could be processed here at home to create thousands of new jobs." It might occur to someone to ask why it is not. One reason might be that lumber firms can fetch a higher price from exports than the homegrown manufacturers are willing to pay. If so, it is not clear why it is in the public interest to artificially depress the returns to an industry that is internationally competitive in order to increase profits in an industry that isn't. Unless of course exports are already to be curtailed by virtue of the softwood lumber accord with the U.S., in which case this provision is of no effect whatever.

And so it goes. The premier's plan aims to "create" another 3000 jobs by reducing the hours worked by those already employed, with the government -- that is to say, every other industry and worker -- picking up any extra costs. This isn't job creation so much as job-sharing. Perhaps this is the ultimate shell game: we will call it full employment when we have everyone working half-time.