Pandemic forces rethink of regional development
The whole idea of “distressed regions” in Canada has been shaken up by the pandemic — economic despair has headed downtown. With COVID-19 rampaging through high-density areas of the country such as the GTA and Montreal, the federal government’s attention to regional development has become a lot more urban in the past couple of months.
Mélanie Joly, the minister in charge of economic development, says the pandemic has forced a big shift in the geographic focus of her department.
“We have to go to downtowns and we have to support businesses in downtown Montreal, in downtown Ottawa, in downtown Toronto,” Joly said in a conversation with me this week. “That’s what we need to do because all the storefronts of all the main streets, the merchant types of streets are affected, and will continue to be affected. So, it’s going to be a first for us … and I’ve changed a bit the mission of the agencies to get there.”
Back in January, I sat down with Joly to talk about her then-new job and what she intended to do with responsibility for economic development across the country. It was a big job — Joly had been handed oversight of the six different agencies that normally distribute around $1.2 billion in federal aid to prop up local business and industry.
She talked over breakfast in the Château Laurier about how this new responsibility was going to take her to remote pockets of the country, where many citizens were feeling neglected by the federal government.
If she did her job well, Joly said, she would show them that Ottawa could be a force for good in people’s lives; that it could actually use its economic clout to make life better. Her tour of regions in need was going to be called “we’ve got your back.”
Enter COVID-19 and a national pandemic — Joly’s job and that slogan took on a whole new meaning, shared government-wide.
“Remember the conversation we had?” Joly said this week. Well now, she said, “People know we’ve got their back. We’re everywhere. We’re everywhere in people’s lives.”
Joly, who’s been grounded in Montreal throughout the pandemic, said that she’s been having virtual conversations with economic-development and business groups all over the country.
One conversation that stands out for her was with the Alberta chambers of commerce. Hundreds of people were on the Zoom teleconference, their eyes trained on Joly. She was looking right back, and what she saw in many of those eyes, she said, was “pure despair.”
“They wanted to be able to make sense (of what was happening) to their own homes and their own businesses,” she said. All the old partisan divides between Alberta and Ottawa also seemed to be set aside. “It didn’t matter I was a Liberal federal minister. They didn’t care. I was there and I had information, and what people in times of crisis are looking at is certainty.”
Joly’s regional development budget has been doubled to roughly $2 billion, and she’s intensely involved in discussions on where best to spend it. The priorities, including those urban ones, are getting clearer every day.
Like many politicians who are knee-deep in the crisis, she finds war analogies useful. In the early days of the national lockdown, she said, they were in the “fog of war,” just trying to find their way through the economic mayhem and chaos.
Lately, though, “I feel the fog has lifted bit by bit and now we’re seeing the battlefield …. In some sectors, it is a carnage. In other places, it’s OK. We’re the Red Cross on the battlefield and trying to take care of the ill and seeing that there’s lots of casualties.”
As a Montreal MP, Joly is situated right in the middle of the “carnage,” in the city hardest hit by the virus. She only needs to walk through the streets of her city to see the devastation of COVID-19. Her own spouse, who owns a design business, had to lay off his employees.
By some fluke of luck, Joly and her spouse actually had to move house at the outset of the pandemic, to a part of the city she didn’t know all that well.
It’s been a strange way to meet the new neighbours. Until about three weeks ago, Joly didn’t know anyone. But then an email circulated through the neighbourhood, floating the idea of a gathering outdoors, just to let people talk to one another and share a glass of wine at a safe distance. It is now a Saturday-afternoon tradition.
That’s the kind of year it’s been. Joly thought she would be travelling to remote, rural areas of Canada to see economic devastation close up, but she’s found it right at home, right downtown.