There is a straightforward solution to this suburban voter’s problems that politicians risk forgetting: crush COVID-19’s fourth wave

Thestar.com
Aug. 30, 2021
Heath Scoffield

At Rain Shen’s tiny cafe in a suburban Richmond Hill strip mall, the legacy of the pandemic is a complex and painful matter.

Shen’s business has been open and shut so many times she doesn’t bother counting. She is facing rising costs for the ingredients she bakes with. She is worried about her kids, whose marks dropped as they tried to sit still through repeated bouts of online learning. The rent on her home where she lives with her three children and her parents has just gone up.

But the fix for all those issues boils down to one straightforward solution that politicians risk forgetting in their strategizing for suburban seats: end the contagion.

Everything else is secondary. All the politicking and promising to fix the problems of the pandemic economy depend on controlling and then crushing the fourth wave.

It’s crystal clear to Shen.

“The pandemic, I know it’s so hard to control. I hope the government can be serious about it,” she says. “It’s impacting our whole life, our lifestyle, the kids, the business.”

In Richmond Hill, like many of the suburbs around Toronto, the pandemic has churned up how people interact, how they travel to work, where they work, and where they live. Housing prices, commuting patterns, public transit and the kinds of jobs we hold -- they are all undergoing massive change, with implications for all levels of government hoping to plot out a post-pandemic recovery.

The Richmond Hill riding is a hotly contested one in this federal campaign, with Liberal incumbent Majid Jowhari in a pitched battle with the previous incumbent, Conservative Costas Menegakis. Both parties see ridings like this as essential for a path to victory, and they have a long list of proposals to help suburbia recover and woo the votes of those ridings that can make or break who next forms government.

But ending the pandemic needs to come first.

When Shen talks about the legacy of the pandemic, the first thing that pops out of her mouth is an anguished complaint about the price of vegetable oil. She is paying double right now what she paid in February, and it’s not like she has a choice if she wants to keep making the macarons and cookies that keep her customers coming.

But she sees inflation for what it is -- mainly a result of dysfunctional supply chains -- and doesn’t think politicians can do much about it, nor can she. She can’t pass along price hikes to her customers because they’re all reeling from the pandemic too. And they’re so fearful of the fourth wave that it won’t take much to keep them away from her store, despite the delicious aromas and colourful pastries.

Menegakis is campaigning on that sentiment, turning voters’ thirst for an end to the pandemic into a challenge against Justin Trudeau for calling an election in the first place.

“People want to get back to their normal lives. That’s why they don’t want an election.”

But reverting back to the way things were is impossible.

If even a small portion of people decide to work from home a couple of days a week instead of resuming their trips back downtown, the effects on suburban traffic, public transit and real estate -- both commercial and residential -- will be consequential, says urban planner Jennifer Keesmaat, formerly the chief planner for the City of Toronto.

“I see that as a profound legacy that will transform how we live.”

She sees huge capacity in public transit opening up as commuting volumes diminish and shift to be more evenly spread throughout the day -- dramatically changing how people go about their day and how governments go about infrastructure and investment.

So far, though, as long as the pandemic persists, it’s very difficult to plot out that change and figure out how to manage it.

Diana Petramala, senior economist at Ryerson University’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development, has been looking at high frequency data to see what’s happening right now to daily work patterns, and she sees signs of just as many suburbanites jumping into their cars to drive downtown as before the pandemic. But they’re driving at different times, and they’re not taking public transit like they used to.

She doesn’t see much indication that companies are pulling out of downtown, but she does see volatility in rents for the labour pool that those companies rely on -- contradictory signals that make it hard to predict where the world of work is heading.

Into this swirl of upheaval, campaigning politicians are promising big, expensive solutions to address change that is still in the grips of the virus, and that no one thoroughly understands. It’s clear that the pandemic has changed suburban life in long-lasting ways, but it’s not clear exactly how.

And until we wrestle COVID-19 to the ground, as Shen so desperately hopes for, that uncertainty can’t be properly addressed.