Navigating a path back to prosperity
Intense efforts needed now to plan for future
It’s tempting to suggest things will return to normal, but that’s unlikely.
At some point, the COVID-19 crisis will abate. The curve will flatten, authorities will get a better grasp on the response and Canadians will see some of the draconian restrictions placed on their lives gradually eased.
It’s tempting to suggest things will return to normal, but that’s unlikely. The changes wrought by the pandemic will be broad and deep. Its impact ranges across the most critical areas of Canadian life, from health care to the economy to personal security and the extent of government involvement in each of those spheres.
Our health- care system has been shown to have been badly ill- prepared for an emergency of this magnitude. We can’t even get critically needed supplies to the people facing the greatest danger — health workers on the front line of the crisis — much less Canadians struggling to make sense of the flood of advice and regulations pouring forth each day. The horrors emerging at a number of care homes for the elderly can’t help but affect people’s thinking about dealing with aging loved ones. The gulf between the availability of medical facilities in small towns and rural areas, and those in major cities, has been laid bare as never before.
There will be widespread expectations that things will be done to deal with these problems and others. But how will we bring them about? The federal and provincial governments have been quick to cobble together rescue packages and new benefits, but when — and, more particularly, how — do they end? It strains credibility to imagine that the minority government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can pour upwards of $ 200 billion into the economy, and be able to simply close the spigot once new virus cases diminish. Doubters need simply recall the shrieks of outrage from Liberals and New Democrats when former prime minister Stephen Harper’s government tried to get back to balance from a deficit a fraction of the size. Already there is talk of emergency benefits being transformed into a guaranteed basic income, the way previous “temporary” measures, such as the income tax, quickly took root as permanent programs.
Major industries face enormous challenges, as altered behaviours produce drastic new outlooks for the travel industry, airlines, restaurants, transit and manufacturing. Ontario Premier Doug Ford — a one-time admirer of U. S. President Donald Trump — observed that the president’s effort to block protective masks from being shipped to Canada demonstrated that “when the cards are down, you see who your friends are.” Ontario won’t be alone in seeking new and more secure means of supply, bringing home the production of items previously trusted to distant plants in countries whose reliability has been called into question.
This crisis has also demonstrated how painful and widespread the real damage would be should Canada ever adopt the sort of blasé bromides offered by boulevard environmentalists towards Canada’s vital energy industry. As former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall wrote this week, oil and gas contributed $108 billion of Canada’s gross domestic product last year, employed over 500,000 Canadians directly and indirectly, and contributed its usual $ 8 billion or so in tax revenue, as, once again, it served as the country’s biggest export. Take a look at the dire situation facing Alberta today and extrapolate that over the country as a whole. Look inviting?
Yet for all the verbal outflow from daily press briefings, we’ve heard little from Ottawa or elsewhere on strategies to deal with any of this. Yes, the prime minister and premiers have been busy, but unless intense efforts to prepare for the future begin now, we will find ourselves as ill- prepared for the recovery as we were for the crisis.
Alberta appears ahead of the curve in this regard. Premier Jason Kenney unveiled an advisory council on economic recovery more than two weeks ago, headed by economist Jack Mintz and peopled by a diverse range of respected individuals with corporate, political, labour and financial backgrounds, including Harper. “At the very minimum we will provide a sounding board to the Alberta government and specifically to the premier and the minister of finance so they can come to us with their different ideas,” noted one of its members.
They can do a great deal more than that. Navigating a path back to prosperity should not be left to any one government, any one party or any one department. Ottawa should take its cue from Kenney and get to work now, assembling a similar body of experts with the insight and experience necessary to develop ideas and propose remedies for returning Canada to some semblance of normality. Given the scope of the challenge, it may require more than one such group, given that health care alone will present a myriad of troubling issues to stickhandle. We do not lack the ability or the expertise to begin planning now for a future that will place immense demands on our ability to adapt and endure. Canada has been playing catch- up since the start of the crisis; it’s time to get ahead.