Having faced a pandemic, there can be no more excuses

After a whirlwind month of campaigning and promise making, our elected representatives can start doing what matters most: serving the people. But this time, things are different.

COVID-19 hit, and hard. Our health, our jobs and virtually all aspects of life for us and our loved ones teetered precariously. For many of us this sense of vulnerability was new. After spending our lives thinking that trouble only finds people who look for it, the pandemic served as a wake-up call that no one is exempt from crisis.

The intrusion of the pandemic into our lives switched on the advocate in many of us. Community organizations sprang to action, new advocacy and interest groups were formed and normally reserved Canadians debated social and political issues with fervour.

More of us than ever stepped up and raised our voices, calling for and expecting better governance. And we are right to demand more, not only because difficult times call for it, but also because policy-makers have never been in a better position to do their jobs.

The pandemic did a masterful job of exposing which citizens have borne the brunt of an imperfect system. A harsh but effective teacher, it taught us lessons on where we need to close gaps through which too many people are falling.

People with disabilities make up a quarter of the population. During the pandemic, tens of thousands of them had to survive on meagre assistance payments far below Canada’s poverty line, making the simplest necessities of life difficult to afford. For persons with disabilities who can work, discriminatory hiring practices meant they largely found themselves in the jobs hardest hit by the pandemic, and disproportionately suffered from layoffs.

Then there are seniors. There were outbreaks in care homes throughout the country and deaths that could have been avoided. At home, seniors disproportionately suffered from isolation and, like persons with disabilities, too often scraped by on meagre assistance payments despite rising costs.

As for Indigenous people, they experience comparatively negative outcomes in most aspects of life, owing to a long history of legislated oppression. That has simply been heightened during the pandemic.

The impacts the pandemic had were thoroughly documented by advocacy organizations, journalists, and researchers who rose to the occasion. They highlighted the pandemic’s ravages and traced them back to pre-existing shortcomings; the openings that must be stitched together before the bleeding stops.

Thanks to this effort, our newly elected policy-makers have an unprecedented amount of high-quality information and front-line stories to assist them in responding to the needs of the public. They also have the chance to draw upon the spirit of advocacy and engagement with public issues that has swept across the country, one that should motivate any dedicated policy-maker to act on the concerns brought their way.

And they can now have confidence that speed and flexibility in policy-making are possible, as has been shown over the last year and a half; legislative gridlock is as much about a lack of urgency and political will as anything else.

The result is that the pandemic, while devastating in many respects, also brought our democracy to life and empowered public representatives in their duty to serve Canadians.

It is incumbent on our newly elected policy-makers to use this opportunity for the benefit of the people who elected them, and there can no longer be excuses for letting down those who need them most.