A local newspaper has uncovered some questionable arithmetic from the provincial government in touting a partnership with a less-than-prominent English soccer club to promote immigration to Newfoundland and Labrador.

Government paid Barrow AFC $170,000 to promote the province on its jerseys, a move which then-minister Gerry Byrne assured would lead to more people choosing to consider making their home in NL.

The minister who took over the population growth portfolio from Byrne, Sarah Stoodley, became an immediate cheerleader for the partnership, boasting of 58,000 hits a day to the homeawaits.ca website as a result of the move. The actual number is a small fraction of that.

Roger Bill, a reporter with the Shoreline News, dug into the numbers, going through Access to Information.

The site homeawaits.ca is administered by a private firm, m5 Communications.

He was told by m5 that there was a miscommunication between them and government. Bill says Stoodley told the Canadian Press 50,000 hits per day, told the New York Times 58,000 and all that got picked up by the Globe and Mail and the BBC but it was all wrong because the real number is 700 hits per day.

Department of Immigration offers clarification on Numbers

The Department of Immigration says Minister Stoodley was referring to daily site visitors using information provided by an “external vendor” in two interviews conducted with media in September.

The department says that information has since been clarified, and instead reflects active users from late June through late September.

Active users on HomeAwaits.ca from June 22nd to September 28th was about 58,000 according to the department.

The peak daily users for the same period occurred on September 15th, with 9,303 users visiting the website on that day.

The department says Home Awaits is where they direct traffic from all their international recruitment activities, including “Latin America, India, Nigeria, Philippines, the UK, Europe and other key markets.”