A Post Covid Canada: Bouncing Back or Bouncing Forward?

If you gaze across our shuttered cities right now at the beginning of April, you may see all around you the budding of spring. Although the human world might have mostly come to a shuddering stop, birds still return from their migrations, branches still thicken as leaves prepare to burst and bulbs still wait in the ground to rise up. And so we are reminded that, difficult though it may be to imagine, this too shall pass.

Yet, while we may be reasonably certain of what each recurring season will look like, we have only a murky glimpse of what our human world will resemble once this has all passed. What we are coming to appreciate is that it will be remarkably different than the one we inhabited before COVID19 gripped us in a death choke mere weeks ago. Once all the social distancing orders have been lifted, the tide of sick recede from our flooded hospitals, and we can safely return to our grocery stores and public spaces without masks and hand sanitizers, what of the wreckage this will have left in its wake?

Economically, the past few months may have erased what little savings many people had and left them deeply in debt, a situation likely to persist for years. Personal and small business bankruptcies are certain to rise. And those already the most precariously positioned financially will bear the heaviest burden. The world of work might also be radically transformed. As companies struggled to maintain operations when the workforce was ordered home, how many will have determined that they can get the work done without as many people, speeding up the drive to automation?

Socially, the experience of other mass crises suggests we will be left with deep emotional and psychological scars. The trauma that descended on us through forced isolation, the loss of loved ones, and the fear engendered by having our lives turned upside down overnight with the sudden possibility of imminent sickness and death will leave its mark. Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and even suicide often follow such traumatic events.

While some predict a baby boom nine months from now due to people being confined together for weeks on end, there is the alternate possibility of a divorce boom. There are legitimate concerns about a spike in domestic violence, affecting not only intimate partners but also their children. Family breakdown is also a quick route into poverty, particularly for women.

Then there are the lost educational opportunities from our schools being locked up at the end of the school year. For those already struggling with learning, how will they adjust and catch up? For those planning to attend university and requiring summer employment to pay for it, how will they afford to continue their studies? How many will simply drop out and not return?

And what about the systems we rely on to manage the intricacies of modern life? Will our social services and charities survive months of lost revenue, particularly the small civic and faith organizations that keep us connected to each other? What about our governments? While the federal government assures us of our national fiscal capacity, how will our local governments who are wholly reliant on a now degraded property tax base and user fees fare? Do we emerge into a new era of local austerity that compromises the programs and services that enhance our community and have long been taken for granted? And will the limitations on our rights, freedoms and privacy that we willingly accepted during this time of emergency be lifted or entrenched? These are critical questions we need to begin thinking about and planning for now.

But how did we get here? There is rightly much talk about our resilience as a community and country. Resilience involves the ability to recover from a shock, determined by the critical vulnerabilities present before the shock occurred. Just like a virus, they are present, insidious and largely invisible. So what are those critical vulnerabilities that left us exposed?

Economically, people have long sounded the alarm about rising inequality across the western world. For many workers wages have been flat for years, leaving us with depleted savings and high levels of debt. A lot of households require two paycheques to keep food on the table and pay the rent, unable to pay their bills if their pay was delayed by two weeks. In the GTA, a recent study found that about half of the workforce is precariously employed, working part-time or contract at lower pay and without benefits. When the crisis hit we found that people on a mass scale had little left in the tank.

Socially, the idea of the common good eroded as we embraced a hyper-individualized view of society. Forgetful of the benefits afforded us by participation in civil society we preferred to think that we were masters of our fate, pullers of our own bootstraps. So we came to accept as normal vast numbers of people living on the street, or sleeping on mats in warehouses, or lining up at a food bank in order to survive. Accompanying this has been a steadily declining level of trust in our governments, institutions and media, and too in each other. Critically we also seemed to lose trust in science and facts. So we bought into the false distinctions of “us” and “them” – them being those of other parties, regions, religions, nationalities, identities … When the crisis hit we found our stock of social capital compromised at exactly the moment we needed to work together and trust our leaders and each other the most.

And this all chipped away at the foundations of the institutions that the generations before us had built to protect us in times like these. We gleefully cheered for tax cuts that weakened our public services, such as health. In the drive for efficiency, we rooted out all perceived redundancies in all our systems, especially healthcare, forgetting that redundancy is a critical resilience property that allows us to fail safe in unforeseen crises.

While most of us were unthinkingly carrying on with our lives, we had not frequently paused to consider the impact our way of life was having on our most vulnerable. Unwilling to afford them the dignity of a secure home, food or work, we allowed our social safety nets to fray leaving those most in need of assistance without access to it. But what the pandemic taught us is that we are all vulnerable. In many ways, those we previously thought of as “vulnerable” were really the canary in the coalmine. Their plight should have been telling us something about the social and economic conditions we were creating for ourselves.

So as our thoughts turn to spring and we begin to consider what our world will look like on the other side of this pandemic, we must keep these critical vulnerabilities in mind. A recently released U.N. report on the long-term impacts of COVID19 framed the challenge before us.

“And when we get past this crisis, we will face a choice – go back to the world we knew before or deal decisively with those issues that make us all vulnerable to this and future crises. Everything we do during and after this crisis must be with a strong focus on building more equal and inclusive societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other challenges we face.”

When this is all over we will have the opportunity to rebuild an economy where there is decent work for everyone and those previously viewed as expendable are honoured and rewarded appropriately. A society that remembers that we are stronger together with a restored vision of the common good, one that takes care of its vulnerable members, buoyed by the knowledge that we are all vulnerable. And a system with a strengthened social safety net to catch us when we fall, with a renewed understanding of the value of public service and the power we share when we engage in collective action to achieve more than we ever each could on our own. One that not only restores the democratic rights and freedoms we willingly surrendered in a time of crisis, but also secures our social, economic and cultural rights as well. Sometimes to be resilient we don’t need to bounce back, we need to bounce forward.

So as we look across our shuttered cities, just like we couldn’t see those hidden vulnerabilities, or the microscopic virus that was spreading in our midst, we might not see the solidarity that has once again risen up among us, but I hope we do. I pray that as we begin to pick up the pieces of our damaged lives and communities, our newfound sense of collective purpose, care for our neighbours, appreciation for our public servants and services persists. That we might once again approach those on the margins of society with empathy and humility, recognizing our own human frailty and common humanity. That our renewed sense of compassion also renews our thirst for justice.  Because resilience is not only about our vulnerabilities but also our latent strengths. Not only did the crisis bring our hidden vulnerabilities into stark relief it has also reminded us of our strengths as a community and a country. Let’s grasp onto them as we move toward spring and contemplate a new world on the other side of our still locked doors.

Derek Cook

Director, Canadian Poverty Institute