The political collaboration that helped Canada weather the pandemic can help neutralize the rising intolerance in our midst

Thestar.com
Sept. 21, 2021

There’s been a lot of ink spilled during the election campaign over the rise of the People’s Party of Canada and the dangers of rising intolerance in our midst.

And there’s no doubt that Canada’s next government will need to be vigilant and mindful that this intolerance could spread like a coronavirus, a virulent strain of populism that could infect our political stability.

But there’s an offsetting development that became obvious during the campaign too, which should give us some heart. Even as the parties lashed out at each other relentlessly, their platforms all included a recognition of the central role of government in supporting Canadians through a crisis — and at least a tacit decision to worry about the fiscal implications later on.

The current buffet of COVID-19 supports expires in October, but multiple promises during the campaign made clear that the next Parliament will extend those benefits in some form, and then carefully withdraw or replace them with more affordable options when the economy regains its footing.

And when the urgent stage of the pandemic is behind us, all the main parties have committed to a gentle fiscal discipline: a declining debt-to-GDP ratio that will make the massive deficits of this year and last easier to carry over the long haul.

To be sure, there are differences between the parties.

The Conservatives say they aim to balance the budget in 10 years. But without interim targets or a clear description of how to get there, that’s the fiscal equivalent to the Liberals’ plans to simply let economic growth and rising tax revenues whittle away at the debt burden over time.

The Conservatives also want to chop the Liberals’ $30-billion child care plan and tend to favour tax incentives rather than direct spending in order to prod the public into changing its ways.

The NDP wants to dramatically raise spending, proposing $215 billion in new measures over five years, compared to $78 billion for the Liberals and $51 billion for the Conservatives. But the NDP also proposes taxing most of that back, namely through a wealth tax.

In other words, if the platforms are a sign, all three parties see the merits in perpetuating the fiscal collaboration that brought them together in the spring of 2020. Back then, as COVID-19 shut down business and sent us sheltering in our homes, they set aside their differences and sought commonality in our most basic values as Canadians: supporting the vulnerable and using the public purse to do so.

That collaboration cushioned the economic blow of the pandemic and set the stage for a humane approach to the pandemic economy that lasted for a year and a half, despite some squabbling here and there.

Fiscal hawks have despaired about the low-key discussion during the campaign around balancing the budget or at least reining in the deficit in the next few years. And the lack of a solid long-term plan for dealing with the mounting debt is indeed worrisome, especially if interest rates start rising.

The next government will need to start grappling with that challenge almost immediately.

But at this point, especially as anger and resentment about the pandemic have found a political home in the PPC, we are lucky that the social cohesion that stems from the three-party economic collaboration around COVID-19 has lasted so long.

Just before Tiff Macklem became the governor of the Bank of Canada in mid-2020, he spoke to the Star about the keys to navigating through financial crisis. Social cohesion was high on his list because, without it, bold decisions about how to protect society from the worst of the crisis can’t be made or implemented.

It’s that social cohesion that will allow us to keep the anti-vaxxers confined to the PPC.

By electing a Liberal minority government, the electorate is sending a message to parliamentarians that that kind of collaborative approach to governing must continue.

In a recent interview about how the pandemic has affected politics in the GTA, Vaughan Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua put his finger on it.

COVID has forced voters to rethink how they work, how they take care of the aging, how they take care of each other and what they expect from their elected representatives, he says.

“When people step back and look at COVID-19, they will have a different appreciation for the role of government.”

One of the important legacies of the pandemic, he noted, is that many voters don’t want to hear politicians fighting amongst themselves and want them to set aside “the pettiness of politics.”

If our newly elected parliamentarians take that message to heart and remember the collaboration that smoothed over the rough edges of the pandemic recession, they stand a good chance of neutralizing the anger of the PPC vote.