Pandemic likely to bring `profound,' `lasting' changes, trade forum hears
It might not be until late this year before it becomes apparent how B.C.'s economy will recover from COVID-19, and it is likely things won't return to the normal that existed prior to the pandemic, a forum hosted by Greater Vancouver Board of Trade heard Thursday.
Metro Vancouver endured an “exceptionally difficult” 2020, Board of Trade CEO Bridgitte Anderson said in introducing the second day of the organization's annual outlook.
Emerging from the crisis, “there will undoubtedly be profound and lasting effects,” Anderson added.
News of the day hinted that conditions for business are likely to get worse before they get better, according to a survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Between six and 18 per cent of B.C. companies, 10,000 to 30,000, remain in precarious positions and are pondering whether to pull the plug, according to the survey. Thursday's panel heard that making such decisions is unlikely to get any easier.
“We're going to find (that) we're likely late in the year before we get any sign of the opportunity to rejuvenate some of our industries,” said media executive Kirk LaPointe, although British Columbians are likely impatient with lagging government initiatives to help.
Part of the difficulty will be in determining which sectors can be rejuvenated, said LaPointe, vice-president of editorial at the Glacier Media Group and editor and publisher of Business in Vancouver, such as a hospitality sector where social events are still out of the question and travel restrictions remain in place.
“It's still early days, (and) you know, it's not a marathon, it's an ultra-marathon,” LaPointe said.
And how British Columbians feel about efforts to push post-pandemic recovery along will be important to politicians, according to Houssian Foundation executive director Mira Oreck.
“I think the pandemic recovery is going to be what makes or breaks this government, and frankly governments across Canada,” Oreck said.
Premier John Horgan's administration went from not having its own mandate to a mandate “they probably couldn't have imagined” in last fall's election, Oreck said. The province has strong support for closing some of the social service deficits that had built up before the pandemic.
So how government addresses issues related to gender, climate action and anti-racism policies in its recovery plan will matter, and are topics that businesses should ask themselves about as well.
“We know who was hardest hit in this pandemic,” Oreck said. “It's women and racialized women, and government and business require a strategy to address that. I think what we're going to see is really quite a transformation.”
That is not to say there aren't stresses in the short term. There are frustrations around the rollout of B.C.'s much-touted small- and medium-sized business recovery grant, a $300-million program that has doled out only $65 million to date.
“I think that is raising questions about how much the province is doing and if it's doing a good enough job actually promoting this program,” said CTV Vancouver reporter Bhinder Sajan.
Other government programs, such as tax credits for companies that are hiring or PST breaks on equipment, require spending money that companies don't necessarily have.
“They're just looking to survive the next couple of months so they can actually figure out what it means to them in the medium to long term,” Sajan said.
Governments do have some leeway with the public when it comes to ballooning deficits and debt, the panelists agreed.
“People are much more comfortable now as an electorate, as British Columbians, in going into increased debt and increased deficit,” said Global News reporter Richard Zussman.
Deficit forecasts of $12 billion to $14 billion are “numbers that don't mean a whole lot to people,” Zussman
said, who are more focused on the priorities of dealing with the health crisis and recovery.
LaPointe said society might have reached a “new orthodoxy where we don't have a great deal of concern about deficits and debts,” although it is an attitude that “might come back to bite us badly.” However, taking up an earnest discussion about how to address inequality “is going to be one of the only healthy outcomes of the pandemic.”
And LaPointe argued that governments have missed an opportunity in not taking the hard medicine of a strict lockdown of the economy to squelch COVID-19. Our health costs are likely to be higher and our economic recovery slower because of that, he said.
Canadians are operating on an assumption that after a second wave of the virus that “there isn't a third and a fourth and a fifth wave coming before we get ourselves vaccinated,” LaPointe said.