One Thing We Have Learned from Covid-19

The global pandemic should have erased any doubt that relying on government to handle crises is a lousy bet. On threat after threat what we get from our political caste is nothing short of incompetence.

Our premiers and our prime ministers had no excuse for being surprised at the plight of our nursing home inmates.  It should not have taken military medical personnel to expose the horrible conditions, the neglect and the indifference of regulators and their political bosses that cost thousands of lives.

When it comes to the far more lethal, perhaps even existential, threat of climate breakdown again incompetence rules the day. What else is it when a government proclaims a climate state of emergency one day and, less than 24 hours later, greenlights a giant bitumen pipeline?

But wait, there's more. Justin Trudeau is a self-proclaimed globalist, a devout free trader. He never talks about the threat that poses to ordinary Canadians, our society, our nation.  He just takes it on faith this is a great thing. That is also major league incompetence.

COVID-19 has accelerated a process that was well underway before it, spreading beyond U.S.-China-EU trade negotiations and into the world’s 50 largest economies. As much as many defenders of the old order lament this trend, it is as significant a shift as the dawn of the World Trade Organization (WTO) global trade era.

What we are experiencing is the realization by state planners of developed countries that new technologies enable a rapid ability to expand or initiate new and profitable production capacity closer to or inside their own markets. The cost savings in transport, packaging and security and benefits to regional neighbors and these countries’ domestic workforces will increasingly compete with the price of goods produced through the current internationalized trade system. 

The combination of high-speed communication, advances in automated manufacturing and computing combined with widespread access to the blueprints and information necessary to kick-start new production capacity increasingly makes the current international network of supply chains resemble a Rube Goldberg contraption, and it lightens the currency outflow challenge that many economies have had to deal with for the past seven decades.

If Trudeau and Morneau were capable of vision they would see the game-changing opportunity around them. They would ditch the fossil-energy albatross round Canada's neck and begin the lengthy process to liberate the Canadian economy from China and other low wage nations.

Build jobs here. Build goods here. Build resilience here instead of perpetuating vulnerabilities to unstable and sometimes capricious global markets.

Canada established the Foreign Investment Review Agency in 1973 as a result of mounting concerns about rising overseas investment, notably the domination of U.S. multinationals, in the Canadian economy. Its provisions were repeatedly downgraded as globalization pressures intensified, but its value is now being reassessed for compatibility with national health policy and resiliency in manufacturing chains. Predictably, pharmaceutical independence is high on the list.

Yeah, great. Let's produce N95 masks here in Canada to be sure but that's chicken scratch. The technology exists to produce a great many things here, to employ Canadians in the production of goods they now buy produced offshore.

This is not a fanciful idea. Nations that focus on building resilience will be much better positioned to weather the impacts of the climate crisis that are predicted to begin hitting us within the next decade. Ignoring this is not an option. It's incompetence.