To Mayor + Council : A crisis is a terrible thing to waste

From: Frank Murphy
Subject: A post COVID-19 Nanaimo
Date: April 29, 2020 
To: Mayor&Council@nanaimo.ca

Hello everyone. You find yourselves living in interesting times.

It occurs to me the task that has befallen you is not unlike the task that has befallen Health Minister Dix and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Henry and their teams, the challenge to go into full crisis management mode, employing triage thinking, before the crisis arrives. And like them, there may in your lifetimes never again be a task and a challenge more important, more consequential.

Mr. Dix and Dr. Henry’s public health teams are successfully taking now the kinds of difficult decisions to avert the unimaginable COVID-19 horrors sweeping across Italy, Spain and France and now the United States. While hoping along with the rest of us that a worse-case scenario does not occur, they have put in place emergency action plans to avert it.

The crisis you face is not the epidemic itself but its consequences.

In 2008 a single economic sector failed, US residential real estate, causing waves of bankruptcies in the interconnected networks of companies dependant on it. Homeowners walked away from their “under water” homes, owing lenders more than the value of their properties. The subsequent defaults on personal and business mortgages and loans, the gutting of the value of pension funds; by all accounts we came within hours of the collapse of the international financial system.

Today, the only consistent analysis I’m seeing across a broad reading of what might happen this time, as potentially a number of sectors fail, is that no one knows what might happen.

The size of the federal government's economic stimulus alone is unprecedented. Economics columnist David Parkinson wrote in the Globe and Mail, "Policy makers have never thrown so much stimulus at the economy so quickly. And it’s all aimed at an economic shock that, by its nature, could whipsaw faster and on a grander scale than anything we’ve seen before. The central bank could be playing soft-toss with nitroglycerin.”

Alarmist? Not at all: realistic.

This crisis, as crises always do, exposes fragilities. There is the opportunity to emerge from this crisis less vulnerable socially, economically, and environmentally.

A food-security economic ecosystem and a re-localized economy are among the areas we should be taking action on now. Investing in a more self-sufficient and resilient local economy. Investing in walkable neighbourhoods. Creating places people love.

It’s often said “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

— Frank