When you hear the phrase “new world order,” it’s often a reference to a conspiracy theory involving nefarious global interests, some of them in the government, trying to impose an ambiguous agenda that might involve ancient aliens, or bar code readers, or any number of imagined atrocities.
In the real world though, “new world order” was a term coined by former U.S. President George H.W. Bush at the end of the Cold War. Bush was trying to say that the battle between capitalism and communism had absorbed world affairs so completely for 50 years that he and other leaders needed to stop, take a moment to look around, and consider where things should be or could be going next.
COVID-19, and reopening after the first wave of the outbreak, is another “new world order” moment. Things have changed so completely in terms of the regular order that we can’t go forward without a massive systemic change. This change will be felt in almost all areas of society, but since this is a city hall column, let’s talk about the effect on municipalities.
To begin with, if there’s one thing that’s become clear from the pandemic, it’s that’s COVID-19 didn’t create new problems so much as exacerbate all the old ones.
In conversations I’ve been having with politicians, activists, and community leaders the difference between what they need during the pandemic and what they needed before is practically nil. Perhaps the only real difference is the urgency. For example, we managed to get a lot of people off the street and into housing when their lives literally depended on it.
Starting from the outside in, there’s the problem of financing a city. Bound to spend within their limits by law, most cities are immediately shackled in the midst of a crisis because while upper levels of government can run deficits and expand debts, a city like Guelph cannot.
This forces cities to be creative so that they don’t run red ink, but the creativity is all on the shoulders of the financial offices of those municipalities. The money that runs cities still predominately comes from property taxes, and that’s problematic enough for a growing city without factoring in the concern that fewer and fewer people will be paying their property taxes as the pandemic rolls on.
That’s why advocacy groups like the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and the Large Urban Mayors Caucus of Ontario are all leaning on the Federal government for emergency funding. These groups will tell you that behind closed doors they’re hearing the right things, but we’ve yet to hear anything firm from the Prime Minister’s podium at his daily briefing.
If you’re like me, and city council meetings are a regular Monday appointment, there are some interesting questions about what those meets can, or should, look like once meeting in-person is an option again?
Tradition, and perhaps a strong sense of techno-skepticism, have kept council meetings to all in-person affairs for years, but now that they’ve crossed the red line and featured councillors, presenters, and delegates through telepresence, can they put that genie back in the bottle? Will a councillor ever need to miss a council meeting again even if they can’t be physically in the council chambers?
Perhaps the biggest thing that will change out of the pandemic is transit. For years, the big challenge was how to get more people on transit, but in the era of social distancing, cramming 60 people on a bus that’s supposed to seat 50 is more reckless and irresponsible than usual.
On the transit front, there are a couple of things that we must confront. First, if transit is indeed an essential service, we need to act like it and the best way to do that is with the funding model. We’ve put an incredible emphasis on getting the right balance of operating funding and funding from the fare box in order to pay for transit, but how much weight can the fare box pull if only 10 people are allowed on the bus at a time?
Second, we need to talk about that 10 people cap. While it’s possible that as the pandemic abates, we could allow more people on the bus at one time, being able to ferry only a limited number of people on one bus is invariably going to leave people on the curb at busy times, and/or on busy routes. The city might have to start prioritizing frequency on a limited number of routes as opposed to total coverage.
Those are three areas that come to mind as we look to establish this new world order, and we could probably make a whole series of columns out of these ideas (and I still might).
Change is scary, but this time in comes with the very real threat to life if we don’t change. At least there’s finally something to really worry about when you hear that now classic conspiratorial phrase even though there’s no conspiracy.
