Think green when planning economic recovery

With discipline, diligence — and a lot of luck — Canadians may soon be through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The same, alas, cannot be said for the ailing Canadian economy.

As a direct result of the pandemic, more than seven million Canadians now rely on the federal emergency benefit program to get by as the unemployment rate has topped 13 per cent. All of the job gains since the 1980s have been wiped out and the latest predictions are for the nation’s gross domestic product to shrink by 7.5 per cent this year.

No matter how you cut it, this is shaping up to be the worst economic downturn in Canada since the Great Depression of the Dirty Thirties.

This is grim stuff, to be sure. But what if the extraordinary measures that the federal government is certain to take to engineer Canada’s economic recovery could simultaneously deal with another existential crisis facing the country? What if Ottawa earmarked a large portion of the tens of billions of dollars it will be spending in short order to create jobs and new business activity for projects that helped Canada meet its climate-change goals?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, reportedly, assigned three top cabinet ministers to devise precisely such a two-pronged strategy for the country as it emerges from its pandemic trauma. We say go for it.

The reasons go beyond the already compelling arguments for Canada to meet its commitments to cutting back the carbon dioxide emissions that are overheating the planet and threatening the future of humankind. It’s not just the environment that demands new, green initiatives. Our economy does, too.

In the months and, yes, years ahead, Canada’s economy will need more than a conventional economic stimulus as it recovers from the pandemic. It will need what we would call new, structural spending. That’s because the current recession is extraordinary. It resulted from deliberate government decisions to lockdown much of the country’s economy, which resulted in millions of people being thrown out of work and the shuttering of tens of thousands of workplaces. Just lifting the lockdown won’t get the economy firing on all cylinders again.

Lingering and well-founded fears about a second wave of COVID-19 mean thousands of businesses will recover slowly while thousands of others will disappear. Particularly in the absence of a vaccine to stop the spread of COVID-19 or effective medicine to treat it, entire sectors of the economy face prolonged uncertainty. No one knows if the entertainment, restaurant, tourism and hospitality industries will ever be the same as before the pandemic.

Clearly COVID-19 will, on its own, force a dramatic restructuring of our economy. Government postpandemic spending must reflect this. And that’s why initiatives that directly target climate change make so much sense. The federal Liberals have a cornucopia of options available. Here are just three.

They could help fund renovations of residential, commercial and public buildings to improve energy efficiency, cut their reliance on fossil fuels for heating and protect them against increased risks, such as flooding, associated with climate change.

Spending money to build more recharge stations could accelerate the shift to electric vehicles. Ottawa could also start investing in hydrogen and other clean-technology sectors in which Canada enjoys a competitive advantage. If these and other initiatives take off, they’ll need a new workforce. They’ll sow new seeds of economic growth.

And if all that could come to pass, Canada would have found not just a silver lining in the COVID-19 crisis but a bold, green one.