Ottawa announced this week about $100 billion in new spending. The deficit, as a result, will be well over five times higher than previously projected. The GDP might shrink by 20 per cent this quarter alone, in large part because the government has shut down the economy.
More than that, pretty much the whole country — from coast to coast, from wing to wing — nodded along in agreement. If these are bold public policies, you wouldn’t know it from the reaction. No canned partisan pushback, no ad hominem sniping.
Even Doug Ford, long the prime minister’s political foil, is praising the feds’ interventions. Ford’s own government, which once fetishized balanced budgets, is now projecting a deficit more than twice as large as last year because of its own well-received coronavirus aid package. Liberals and libertarians alike are nodding along.
Public health experts are urging us to stay home — and we nod along. Few beyond the denizens of the internet’s darkest corners question their motivations or their expertise. We accept their guidance and stigmatize those who flout it.
This is not to say that our governments have been perfect. We will continue to debate for weeks and months whether their responses have been quick enough, bold enough, transparent enough, fair enough. The age of blind deference is dead and for good reason. There will come a time when our governments will be held to account.
But the embrace of the state’s potential after years of rising anti-government sentiment; the trust in experts; the understanding that collective challenges require collective responses and the proof that such responses are still possible in our increasingly atomistic, distrustful and polarized world — these are things to behold.
And it would do us good to behold them. The fear of the pandemic is not just about illness and financial distress. There is well-documented anxiety, too, that the crisis will cause a social breakdown, ushering in a dystopia of crumbled institutions and adversarial individualism. That fear, a constant in times of disruption, is one reason there has been widespread hoarding and a run on guns and ammunition.
But history suggests this fear is largely unfounded; it’s what social scientists call the “disaster myth.” The hoarders, in their panic, are miscalculating. As conspicuous and disconcerting as the anti-social actors may be, they are nevertheless a minority.
Most of us are staying home, sacrificing our lifestyles to protect ourselves and one another. Neighbours are shopping for neighbours, strangers helping strangers. Doctors and nurses and other frontline workers are risking their health for ours. Nightly, on our balconies, we applaud them. And, yes, our elected representatives are exploding political orthodoxies as they attempt to meet the challenge, taking on enormous debt to carry us through.
We are witnessing an extraordinary surge of solidarity. Suddenly the notion that the economy exists to serve people and not the other way around seems blazingly obvious. Suddenly the notion that we can accomplish more collectively than we could ever accomplish alone is beyond debate.
The pandemic is not bringing about a world of crumbled institutions and adversarial individualism; that’s the world we seemed to be heading toward before the virus started its terrible work: a world of declining trust in governments and in experts and in each other and the diminished strength, constrained ambition and vulnerability to demagogues all that entails.
But in a disaster, our strongest instinct is to band together. It is our great evolutionary advantage. Just look how governments and experts and we together are mobilizing.
When the pandemic passes, will we remember how we got through it and that there could have been no other way? As we move on to other challenges, big and small, will we remember that some things we can accomplish only together? Will we fall back on a dim view of ourselves, each other and the state — or remember who we can be, and what we can do, at our best?
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