Premier and Tourism Minister Dr. Ewart Brown deserves credit for admitting on Friday that a statistical collection failure had led to a massive inflation in tourism air arrival figures for the second half of last year. And he was right to move to restore confidence in the data collection system immediately.

Clearly, this error was not Dr. Brown's fault, but he recognised that the buck stopped with him and outlined a clear solution to the problem. However, Director of Computer Operations Michael Oatley's claim that the differences from one month to the next in the figures were not substantial enough to cause immediate alarm does not hold water.

The spike in the number of people coming in June alone to stay in private residences was dramatic enough for this newspaper to ask questions about it; the continuing trend should have been caught months ago. The effect of this mistake is real and severe for current tourism strategy.

Dr. Brown was quick to pat himself on his back earlier this year when the statistics appeared to show that arrivals from the Island's main gateway, New York City, were up.

Just last month, he claimed that increases in air arrivals from New York from September to December had led JetBlue to add a second flight to the Island. Now it seems those increases were a mirage as returning residents to the Island were being counted as tourists. Is JetBlue still as "bullish" now that those statistics have turned out to be false?

Similarly, Tourism was happy to report that arrivals from the UK and Canada had increased in 2008 even as overall US arrivals fell. Now it seems they have fallen because expatriates travelling home and back were being counted.

That means that strategies already in place for 2009 are predicated on false premises; that arrivals from New York City were strong, when they weren't and that marketing to the UK and Canada was good, when it wasn't.

Dr. Brown is about to spend $650,000 with the Boston Red Sox to promote Bermuda, presumably because a similar $500,000 deal with the New York Mets seemed to pay off last year. Now we know it did not.

And Dr. Brown's strategy of cutting back on advertising while pouring money into events like the Love Festival and the Bermuda Music Festival now looks even more misguided. Now that the real 2009 tourism statistics have been announced, the community also knows that the year was stunningly poor by almost any measure, and among the worst in the Caribbean region as a whole.

For some time now, Dr. Brown has been given credit for a tourism recovery that now looks to be dead on arrival. To be sure, he cannot be held responsible for the world economic downturn, but the fact is that the recovery was never as pronounced or as sustained as his propagandists made out.

The muddling of the cruise ship policy last year and the failure of the so-called Platinum Period of new hotel construction, along with the drop in air arrivals now leaves the Island's second industry in desperately poor shape, and only a concerted community effort will revive it.

Ever since Dr. Brown became Premier, he has insisted on retaining the Tourism and Transport portfolios, presumably on the basis that no one could do them better.

At this point, one wonders if there is anyone in the Cabinet who could do worse, especially in tourism.

Even those who feel that that assessment is too harsh must surely acknowledge that at a time when the Island is facing what may be its most severe economic crisis since the Second World War that the Premier should be focusing on the performance of the Government as a whole and not being responsible for, and held accountable for, individual ministries. It is time for Dr. Brown to give up these portfolios.