‘RESILIENCE’ PLOY TO SEIZE ECONOMY.

Our word for today is “resilience.” If you have not seen references to resilience in the past couple of months, or even the past few days, then perhaps you need to upgrade your social media skills. A Google News search produced an opening page of 10 items along with a note advising that “about 34,600,000 results” were available for deeper perusal.

Resilience is the post- COVID-19 replacement for sustainable (117,000,000 Google results). In pre-pandemic economic policy terms, sustainable development called for a rethink of global, national and local economic objectives. The United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development policy goals describes the agenda as “ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand- in- hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth — all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.”

These sustainable development objectives are identical to those of the global resilience movement. The only difference is the label.

By definition, resilience is the ability to bounce back from a destructive crisis. As a political force, the resilience movement’s plan is to lift the economy out of the deep lockdown hole into which global politicians have deliberately thrown us by having the same politicians take control of the economic wreckage they have created so as to re-engineer the whole system.

New “resilience” efforts are emerging daily around the world. Last week the newly formed Canadian “Task Force for a Resilient Recovery” declared its objectives: “The Task Force will make actionable recommendations on how governments can use a range of tools — including direct public investment, leveraging private capital, targeted tax cuts and incentives, regulatory sandboxes (to enable innovation), and behavioural ‘ nudges’ — to spur jobs and generate lasting economic activity while also helping to build a clean and resilient economy.”

Task force members include former Justin Trudeau aide and WWF radical Gerald Butts, the Ivey Foundation’s ubiquitous Bruce Lourie, and Stewart Elgie, head of the Smart Prosperity Institute, a sustainable- green advocacy organization that seems to get a lot of funding from governments.

Another new Canadian resilience group is behind the 2020 Declaration for Resilience in Canadian Cities, organized by former Toronto city planner Jennifer Keesmaat and signed by a collection of former Toronto mayors and dozens of academics and activists. “The COVID-19 pandemic provides a once-in-a lifetime responsibility to accelerate the change we require in Canadian cities.” Proposals including building more public housing, restrictions on urban sprawl, mass expansion of bike lanes, a moratorium on expressways including those now under construction, electric car mandates, a 40 per cent urban tree canopy, etc. etc.

The European Union’s official science hub recently produced a paper titled “Time for transformative resilience: the COVID-19 emergency.” The objective of the paper is to seize the lockdown as a call to action. “The current COVID-19 emergency seems to be warning governments worldwide that new crises of unforeseeable nature are likely to emerge, as the combination of environmental degradation, societies with increasing inequalities and deep economic interconnections have made the world more vulnerable. In these circumstances, ensuring the resilience of our society is crucial.”

The climate hand-wringers at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday published a commentary titled “5 ways entrepreneurs and SMES can build resilience in a coronavirus economy.” The authors warned that “the next shift is sure to come whether it is in the form of a pandemic, extreme weather, forest fires or rising seas.”

Also on Tuesday, an op-ed in the Financial Times of London by a group of British academics called for “a new approach to U.K. resilience.”

And on it goes.

When it comes to post- COVID-19 economic transformation, however, few members of the resilience movement can match the reform enthusiasms of Jim Stanford, the former Canadian Auto Workers chief economist. In recent months, Stanford has been drawing comparisons between the COVID lockdown and World War II. On CBC Radio’s The Current last Sunday, Stanford said market-driven private enterprise cannot rebuild the economy. “It’s going to need a post- war reconstruction program just like we had after World War II, and that implies a much larger role for government going forward.”

Stanford, now based primarily in Australia, said Canada’s economy has been “deliberately shut down.” To meet the crisis, “we need national government to be there, to be big, to be fast and to mobilize everything it can. It’s kind of like fighting a war. We never stood back from World War II and said we can’t afford to fight this war. We did what we had to do and we mobilized the resources, including the money to pay for it.”

To push his argument, Stanford rides an old and once-fashionable economic idea that, somehow, war can be good economically. World War II “solved the Great Depression” by mobilizing enormous resources in an urgent attempt to meet a huge threat (global fascism),” he wrote last March. “We now need another, peaceful war — a war on poverty, on epidemics, and on pollution.”

Big spending, massive debts, and sweeping government interventions will be essential, says Stanford. It’s a plan mostly already adopted by the Trudeau government, including Stanford’s support for state aid to businesses — providing the government “take public equity states in these businesses as a condition of financial support.”

Stanford uses the word “resilient” only once, in an April economic warmongering essay for Policy Options.

In this economic war, however, it looks like we will need a little less resilience and a lot more of another World War II feature: La résistance!