When Canada has put the COVID-19 crisis behind us, we will likely make changes in our attitudes toward how we restore our economy and what changes will better prepare us for the future.
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| Contemplate economic change |
Merran Smith & Dan Woynillowicz offer an opinion on April 8 2020 in the National Observer that Canada should come out of COVID-19 with a new economy. The stark reality is that Canada’s traditionally strong oil and gas sector is confronted with both cyclical and structural change. It will never return to its halcyon boom days of the early 2000s. We need to shift from a mantra of “no barrel left behind” to one in which no oil worker or region is left behind. And we need to reorient and rebuild our energy sector with a focus on clean energy.
To start, renewable power sources, energy storage and transmission lines. More public transit, walking paths and bike lanes. Clean fuel and renewable gas plants that draw on waste streams from forestry, agriculture and municipal garbage. Electric vehicle charging stations and a domestic zero-emission transportation industry that already spans buses, trucks, cars and ferries. Energy efficient homes, buildings and factories.
And for all this building, let’s use Canadian-made, low-carbon concrete and steel, or sustainably produced mass timber. Let’s use the metals and minerals abundant in Canada in those wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.
To build this workforce, we need support for training and retraining Canadians whose past jobs may not return. Many of these programs can and should start while unemployed workers are sitting at home.1
The Resilience web site discusses COVID-19 and a New New Deal. On a societal level, Covid-19 is opening doors and perceptions at unprecedented rates. This group urges us to amplify any insights and revelations that help us as a global society to use this shock to our future benefit.
The original New Deal, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, established between 1933 and 1939, employed 8.5 million people, lifting them and their families from poverty. The New Deal became fundamental to a more progressive government; Social Security, banking regulations like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, home loans, farm and rural programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps and a significant expansion of the National Park Service were just a few of the elements that led to a remarkable transformation of our government.2
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| Changes after COVID-19 |
During an Interview with Pope Francis on April 8, 2020 Austen Ivereigh asked whether it was possible to see an economy that is more human, and if the Pope sees the crisis and the economic devastation it is wreaking as a chance for an ecological conversion, for reassessing priorities and lifestyles.
“every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger. Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption (Laudato si’, 191) and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. We need to reconnect with our real surroundings. This is the opportunity for conversion...Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human”, he adds, “but let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it. We have lost the contemplative dimension; we have to get it back at this time.”3
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| Sea level rise |
Marc Stenger (Troyes, France), bishop president of Pax Christi International, reminds us that Pope Francis offers us this monumental gift of “Laudato Si” which could become more and more our Charter in the post-coronavirus era. Our responsibility as we define the new economy after the COVID-19 crisis is to contemplate a plan to restore greater concern for the economic health of all people and encourage our greater kinship with Nature and care of the planet.
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