What has the pandemic really taught all of us?

As we hit the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, what have we learned? How would we have prepared if we had known COVID-19 was about to arrive? With the knowledge of the last year, what steps should we have taken in advance to minimize this crisis and other ones?

Many of these are obvious. Knowing what we know now, would we have been comfortable with warehousing senior sin privately- operated long-term-care homes? Would we be OK with allowing these facilities to rely so heavily on part-time staff and pay them so poorly and rarely inspect them to “save taxpayers’ money?”

Would we have been so quick to “save” more money by squeezing funding for hospitals and other health care facilities? Would we have been OK with increasing homelessness and unconcerned about the extreme inequality that appears to have consigned so many to an early death because they sit at the bottom end of incomes? Would we have continued to ignore the systemic racism that has left Black, Indigenous and other people of colour so vulnerable to the pandemic?

Would we have sat back while Canada’s last public vaccine-producing facility — Connaught Laboratories — was privatized and its capacity dismantled?

There’s another profound learning from the pandemic. In an emergency the first thing governments must do is ensure that everyone understands the nature and magnitude of the crisis so that they are able and eager to do what is necessary to deal with it.

In light of all this learning, what should we be doing now about the next global emergency? There’s already one staring us in the face that’s far more deadly than COVID-19 — an emergency that’s already imposing mass destruction and death in multiple corners of the earth. It is an emergency that every year gets worse and worse.

It’s called the climate emergency. We already know exactly what causes it and humanity is already experiencing many of its catastrophic effects.

In the last 12 months, California fires burned 4.2 million acres. That’s 50 per cent more than any previous year and nine times the average year. Twice that acreage went up in smoke in the Amazon. Australian fires consumed more than one-fifth of that continent’s forests and killed about three billion animals. Even more (47 million acres) was destroyed in Siberia where the temperature of 38 C was recorded inside the Arctic Circle for the first time known to humanity.

The Atlantic spawned an unprecedented number of named-storms in 2020. Both Florida and the Texas-Louisiana area were hit hard twice. Central America suffered both a Category 4 and a Category 5 hurricane less than two weeks apart which devastated Nicaragua and Guatemala and demolished tens of thousands of homes. Fiji is the latest victim of the new superstorms.

The oceans will rise at least a metre this century, and unstoppable melting at the north and south poles will eventually quadruple that amount.

So what is the response so far? Municipal governments and the prime minister have belatedly promised to stop making the problem worse by reaching carbon net zero by 2050. That’s like saying over the next 30 years we’ll gradually put in place lockdowns, masks and physical distancing to “flatten the curve!” In the meantime Canada will keep exporting as much oil (virus to the global atmosphere) as possible by massively expanding the now federally-owned transmountain pipeline.

Even a child can clearly see what needs to be done. “We need to stop focusing on goals and targets for 2030 or 2050. We need to implement annual binding carbon budgets today.” — Greta Thunberg.