As the COVID-19 pandemic winds down, whatever happened to the ‘new normal’?

In the early stages of COVID-19 — was it only a bit over a year ago? — there was a lot of hopeful talk about a “new normal” that would surely prevail when the country emerged from the pandemic.

Lessons had been learned. Mistakes would not be repeated. Canadians and their political leaders had learned the value of co-operation, of putting differences aside, of coming together in the face of a common enemy, as we had in wartime. We would be well prepared for the next crisis. Everything would be different. The new normal would mean a better future for all Canadians.

This may be an appropriate juncture — with light appearing at the end of the COVID tunnel — to ask a few questions. Whatever happened to the new normal? Does it exist? Has anything really changed? Is the brave new normal any different than the discarded old normal?

The temptation is to dismiss the new normal as an illusion, as nothing more than a convenient myth to help the country through COVID’s first wave. Maybe that’s all it was, and all it is.

But I think some things have changed, if more in perceptions and expectations, than in attitudes and behaviour. All 14 governments (federal, 10 provincial, three territorial) realize how dangerously illprepared they were last year and how incompetent most of them were at times. The public seems to share that perception.

The politicians know that their voters expect a fail-safe system for the early detection of impending epidemics, along with vastly improved communications (government-to-government and government-to-public); people are entitled when they are in danger and what their leaders are doing to protect them.

All governments are aware that they must prepare for future global health emergencies by stockpiling essential supplies and increasing ICU capacity.

I would be astonished if they did not at least prepare plans to take these necessary steps.

Planning is essential. But what about the follow-through? Will governments — all of them are facing unprecedented, even crippling, debts from COVID — be willing or able to invest what it will take to gear up for another pandemic? Or will they do in the new normal what governments have always done in the old normal: put their money where it will do them the most political good?

Will Ontario, for example, actually invest the billions it will take to replace outdated and unsafe nursing homes, to rehabilitate still serviceable older buildings, to construct enough homes to meet the current and future demand for beds?

And will it increase health spending to ensure that long-term-care workers are paid a decent wage? Will it ante up for an adequate inspection regime for LTC facilities?

Will the election-bound Ford government revert to the old outof-sight-out-of-mind approach to long-term care or will it, instead, put its money where it figures the most votes are?

If there is one area that seems immune to a new normal, it is politics. In Ottawa, where the parties banded together quite effectively in the early months of the pandemic, it is back to business as usual: confrontation, blame and fingerpointing. The same old politics also prevails at the federal-provincial level — provinces grabbing every cent of federal money they can get without yielding an inch of jurisdiction. Hence, no national standards for long-term care.

And, back in Ontario, Premier Doug Ford, livid at the notion of teachers unions campaigning to defeat his Conservative government, recalls the legislature into emergency session to endorse his use of the so-called “nuclear weapon” — Section 33, the notwithstanding clause, of the Canadian Constitution — to override a ruling by a single judge of the Ontario Superior Court.

He could have appealed the ruling to the Ontario Court of Appeal. It would have been the normal course, but the premier is too angry, too impatient. The teachers must be stopped!

The old normal was bad enough. If this is to be the new normal, it is worse. It is absurd.

Will governments — all of them are facing unprecedented, even crippling, debts from COVID — be willing or able to invest what it will take to gear up for another pandemic?