Download This PaperThe Policy Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic: Recommendations for Canada
Opinion, Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2020
9 Pages Posted: 2 Apr 2020 Last revised: 2 Apr 2020
Date Written: March 2020
Abstract
This article addresses the issue of the suggested trade-off between attenuating the health costs of the corona-virus pandemic and limiting economic damage. It argues that there is no such trade-off because the economic costs are already effectively booked. Accordingly, Canada has to organize an orderly shutdown of non-essential production, retool for essential production, implement a quarantine, organize life support for the population and for Canadian businesses, and plan and execute a Korean-style testing program to hunt down the virus and stamp it out. At the same time, Canada needs to support an open trading system to ensure it has access to global supplies to fight the pandemic and in turn to support its own production for export abroad. The pandemic has put into sharp relief the need for international cooperation. We have seen some positive examples of cooperation in this crisis, particularly in terms of exchange of information and data at the professional level. But for the most part, this has not been matched at the political level – at least in the first instance, institutions were unable to overcome the reflexive impulse to “pull up the drawbridges”. The freedoms that characterized Globalization V2 – the largely unfettered movement of goods, services, ideas, capital, and people – which were increasingly being restricted even before the pandemic, seem now ever more precarious. A reset is needed and is inevitably coming. The pandemic is just the last straw – albeit a very large and heavy one – laden on the back of a system that was no longer representative of, or fit for the governance of, the world under the technological conditions of 2020.
Keywords: Coronavirus, Pandemic COVID-19, Canada
JEL Classification: F13, F15, F55
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation