Imagine a time of global confusion and worry, of a landscape that shifts daily under your feet, of political indecision in Canada and in a White House led by a president who changes his mind hour to hour. What is thought true on Tuesday isn’t on Wednesday. Disinformation is everywhere, too, dividing people into angry camps.
We are talking, of course, about the response five years ago to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries dithered over whether to ban flights from China, where the disease first broke out. The Public Health Agency of Canada told Canadians there was no need to wear masks, and then changed its mind. U.S. President Donald Trump went back and forth almost daily on whether the virus was a threat or just a mild flu.
But we could also be describing the current day. Mr. Trump’s ping-ponging tariff threats against Canada and the rest of the world, and his upending of the alliances and norms that have governed the democratic world for 80 years, have left the world grasping for answers.
Like the novel coronavirus, the President’s unjustified actions have caught Canada off-guard and exposed dangerous blind spots in critical policies.
Just as we acknowledge in retrospect that Canada was ill-prepared for a pandemic that a globalized world had made inevitable, we now have to face the fact that Canada has been too reliant on free trade with the United States, and too dependent on it for defence, and that in its naiveté it failed to imagine the worst, let alone prepare for it.
We are not alone in this; Europe, too, has been overreliant on the U.S. and is now in the process of shaking itself awake.
The COVID-19 pandemic and America’s betrayal of its long-held values are thus similar in a telling way: they both illustrate how democracies that operate on four- or five-year voting cycles can fall into the trap of ignoring seemingly remote dangers they ought to be planning for, preferring instead to trade in short-term platitudes and easy promises.
The pandemic was a brutal example of Canada’s chronic inability to plan for the worst. When Ottawa finally got around to releasing a report last October about how the various levels of government had handled the crisis, the report’s authors pointed out that its recommendations closely mirrored those in an exhaustive report on the 2003 SARS outbreak in Ontario, which in turn had closely mirrored a 1993 report on the HIV epidemic.
COVID-style aid not what Canada needs against tariff threat
Three outbreaks in 30 years, and still Canada and the provinces have not jointly developed a comprehensive and co-operative plan for managing the next novel contagion to arrive on our shores. If one arrives this year or next, there is still no playbook that anyone can turn to for sound guidance.
That same inability to focus on issues that don’t provide instant political gratification is exacerbating the threats coming from the Trump White House.
The tariffs are all the more potent when applied to a Canadian economy that Ottawa and provinces have been happy to coast on the fumes of North American free trade, never imagining this might come back to haunt the country.
Politicians of all stripes have repeatedly ignored calls to make the country more competitive and increase its productivity. That includes tearing down the ludicrous interprovincial trade barriers that have been shaving points off of Canada’s gross domestic product for decades.
In a similar vein, Ottawa has underfunded and underequipped the Canadian Armed Forces in the belief the U.S. would always have its back. The nation’s ability to procure weapons is likewise a laughable web of parochial regional interests and political interference that is always years behind the military’s real needs.
And why? Because it’s easier to sell Canadians on immediate largesse the year before an election than it is to convince them of the need for long-term investments that will cost billions and may not be needed for years, or even decades.
But they will always be needed some day. That is the point. Canada in the past 110 years has been through two world wars, a depression, several recessions and multiple pandemics, and yet Parliament continues to assume the best and refuses to prepare for the inevitability of the worst.
A serious country plans for the worst and only hopes for the best. COVID-19 taught us that lesson. Mr. Trump’s unrelenting aggression is now doing the same. This time, we had better learn from it.