Rex Murphy: The echoes of 2020 will be felt for ages

A man wearing a mask to protect against COVID-19 walks past a mural in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on May 12, 2020. PHOTO BY ANGELA WEISS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

 

After the initial stumbling, on mask wearing, banning foreign flights, imposing restrictions on shopping and social gathering, events in Canada took a predictable turn. Our governments went with the practice of every other government worldwide. They updated their advice on masking, went into the «flatten the curve» phase, gave the prescribed cautions about «essential» and «non-essential» gatherings. Such concerns as grocery stores, trucking services and pharmacies made the essential list.

«Hold tight, you’ll last, all will be normal soon,»was the message. It turned out that flattening the curve was but a temporary slogan, and restrictions on commerce went from purely temporary and a caution of the moment, to a long-term, near-continuous reality.

COVID has been an economic storm, the full violence of which we do not know, and will not at best for a year or two. At the governmental level, COVID wrought huge changes. It brought us Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s morning descent of the steps of Confederation Cottage, and then before select scribes of the Ottawa press gallery descriptions of each day’s vast withdrawals from the national treasury. Accountability was returned to its eunuch function as a mere word in the dictionary.

What is even more worrisome than the degrading or bypassing of all normal Parliamentary function, was how it was so easily, so mildly, accepted by the public.

The official Opposition was very greatly undercut in its ability to question, oversee and force some accountability. Canada went from a $40-billion deficit to a $400-billion one in less than a year. And, it now also wears a national debt well in excess of a trillion dollars. An accumulation of deficit and debt on this scale, parcelled out with minimal to no accountability, fired off in all directions under the pressures of each passing moment during a crisis, carries severe implications for the future.

So Canadians, frustrated by the conditions of our new national «normal» and awaiting the moment when the old «normal» returns, are, alas, likely to be frustrated in that hope. The measures brought in to respond to COVID have vast future implications for both Canadian citizens and their government. Events of this year will determine the shape of many years to come.

Source: Rex Murphy | NP