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"In a column published on the IRIS blog and translated for the CCPA's Behind The Numbers blog, Guillaume Hébert says that the COVID-19 crisis marks a point of no return on a global scale that could definitively change “our relationship to the community, to public services, to governments, to supply chains, to borders and to relations among nations.”  The current situation is indeed unique and it will have a lasting impact in a number of areas. We are seeing the application of a series of measures by the three levels of government—municipal, provincial and federal—that are leading us directly towards an economic recession in the name of public health. The economic slowdown is also accompanied by an increase in public expenditures, as seen in the opening of 31 COVID-19 testing clinics in Quebec and the establishment of temporary federal support programs to make up for income lost by businesses and workers. In addition to these macro-economic and political factors, which are themselves unprecedented, our relationships to others and our habits of consumption are being rethought, and these reflections will no doubt continue to have an important place in public discussions well after the end of the pandemic.  This column is intended to extend the thoughts of our colleague by reflecting on the concept of “return to normal.” The first factor to take into account in analyzing the question of returns to normal or “crisis exits” is the capacity of public institutions to adapt, as well as the strength of the incentives and constraints that lead these institutions to want to create a climate favourable to private investment. A second factor to consider is that the existence of discontent or dissatisfaction with the present situation, characterized among other things by a major increase in socio-economic inequality and an increase in  Canadian household debt, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving significant social change. It seems likely that, once the pandemic has run its course, the institutions that helped normalize the current situation will propose the same measures as before, with even more force and determination if these measures allow for thwarting emerging desires for social change.  There are many signs, for example, that governments will seek to stabilize their national economies and balance their respective budgets by strengthening certain so-called “strategic” economic sectors. The federal government is presently considering a plan to rescue the Canadian oil and gas industry and a draft regulation that would allow it to eliminate environmental assessments for exploratory oil and gas drilling east of Newfoundland. In addition, the phenomenal increase in government deficits for the currrent year leads us to believe that it will be easy to brandish the spectre of debt to reduce, once again, public spending on goods and services. While these prognostications are highly speculative, we think that most governments will try to implement these various strategies despite the many social consequences associated with them.  The President of the World Bank, David Malpass, moreover, said in a telephone conference with the finance ministers of the G20 countries on March 23 that governments, in the context of the post-COVID-19 recession, are going to have “to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong. For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.”  Taking these two factors into account, we want to participate more broadly in discussions on what stance to take with respect to the pandemic by stating the following: a return to normal, by which we mean the relative stabilization of economies, will eventually take place, but the exact parameters of this return, as well as the way in which “normalcy” will eventually be defined and promoted in the public square, a"
<https://monitormag.ca/articles/what-kind-of-normal-do-we-want-a-response>