To read the full essay that this commentary is based on, click here.
The coronavirus is catalyzing new and emerging debates about our pre-pandemic assumptions across a wide range of public policy and governance issues. Although no one can know for sure at this stage, history tells us that these types of major crises tend to have profound and lasting effects on how we think about the economy, society and geopolitics.
In a new essay for First Policy Response, we aim to contribute to this pandemic-induced exercise of individual and collective introspection about how we may adjust our policy framework for a post-pandemic world. In particular, the essay sets out two separate yet related ideas:
- Contemporary debates about fiscal policy have come to substitute quantitative questions about the size and sustainability of deficits and debt for more fundamental ones about the composition of government spending and the trade-offs between consumption and investment.
- Contemporary policy and politics have come to too heavily discount the future. We seem to have collectively decided that there’s no role for the future in politics and no role for politics in the future, which has had significant economic and cultural consequences for our society.
In response to these pre-pandemic policy and political trends, we encourage Canadian policy-makers to reposition the future closer to the centre of the debate on issues including (but not limited to) fiscal policy. As part of such a reorientation, the essay recommends a renewed governmental commitment to science and technology in the form of significant new public investments, and institutional reforms to how science is funded, carried out and ultimately applied in our economy and society.
Such an agenda can build on the some of the approaches and models used in response to the pandemic – including a greater role for public-private partnerships, the use of “missions” or “challenges” to stimulate private-sector investment and innovation, and a greater emphasis on cultivating domestic industrial and scientific capabilities.
The essay is written primarily for a conservative audience for a couple of reasons. First, we broadly self-identify as conservatives and come to these questions with conservative dispositions and preferences. Second, we think that Conservatives (and conservatives) must be part of this evolving debate about post-pandemic reforms to public policy and governance.
Progressives have staked out a post-pandemic position under the auspices of “Build Back Better,” which envisions an expansion of the social welfare state and a greater role for government in the redistribution of wealth in the country. These arguments are mostly reasonable and, in certain cases, justified by the experience of the past several months. It’s clear, for instance, that the Employment Insurance system needs to be modernized.
We’ve started to see the outlines of some of the lessons that Conservatives (and conservatives) may take from the pandemic – including the limits of unfettered globalization and the need for some “reshoring” in certain strategic sectors – but we have yet to see the same systematic thinking about what these lessons may mean for Canadian public policy. We hope that this essay can help to galvanize such a debate on the Canadian Right.
We’re under no illusion that this essay provides a comprehensive blueprint to a post-pandemic conservative agenda. Instead it aims to arm Conservatives (and conservatives) with a framework for thinking about government spending and the role of the future in how people think about themselves, their families and the country.
A final note: although our target audience is conservatives, the ideas in our essay shouldn’t be interpreted as relevant for only one side of the political debate. Futurists across the ideological and political spectrum may indeed find value in this kind of thinking as they develop their own post-pandemic visions for a different and better future for Canada.
Sean Speer is fellow-in-residence at the Public Policy Forum, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and a former economic adviser to the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper. Graeme Moffat is a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
