Astute companies will be preparing now for post-vaccination business operations, but this question should be top of mind for taxpayers: is their government doing the same?
There are many complications involved in restarting company operations and recalling idled and isolated workforces. The pandemic has seen to that. Market forces will demand efficient and quick response to those complications. Meanwhile back at the legislature, considerations need to be less about restarting and more about restraining and rethinking the outflow of public funds. Opening the sluice gates of taxpayer-funded aid is far easier than shutting them off. The former makes political friends; the latter requires hard choices that make political enemies. Guess which one prevails at the legislature and down at your local constituency office in a country that in 2020 outpaced most other developed countries in distributing fiscal stimulus. But hard choices are what leadership is all about, and they need to be made now to ensure they will be based on strategic economic recovery planning rather than on desperation in the face of fiscal collapse. Persistently low interest rates are currently delaying that crisis for governments bent on putting more businesses and voters on the public payroll. But borrowing money, even when interest rates are negligible, is not sustainable for the economy or government budgets. As much as anywhere else, that applies in B.C., where the province’s net debt has jumped 111% to $61.9 billion since the 2007-08 fiscal year. Granted, financial support from senior levels of government over the past year has been fundamental to avoiding far more serious damage to the economy from the pandemic. But habituating business to government assistance beyond the COVID-19 crisis and, in the process, eroding private sector innovation and the public purse’s ability to respond to future economic downturns is a recipe for institutionalizing mediocrity in productivity and competitiveness.
