“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Those words were spoken by economist Milton Friedman, generally acknowledged as one of the most successful advocates of Neoliberal Economics. Friedman went on to advise both US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. These powerful leaders implemented many of the ideas that Friedman had kept alive, and those changes rippled out to the rest of the world, fundamentally changing the global economic order.

In the decades since, many economists, philosophers, sociologists, and other thinkers have been keeping their own set of ideas alive. Many of these thinkers have been fiercely critical of the ways in which we’ve decided to structure our economy. They’ve tried to advocate for their solutions, but many have been ignored or suppressed by a mainstream that has increasingly embraced Neoliberalism and it’s set of ideas and values.

However, we are now in the midst of a crisis that many are arguing has put the failures of our current system on full display. As part of this crisis we’ve watched previously ardently neoliberal governments in Canada and around the world embrace solutions that would normally be detestable to their own worldviews. As George Monbiot recently wrote in an article in the Guardian, “It may not be true that there were no atheists in the trenches. But there are no neoliberals in a pandemic.”

The COVID19 pandemic is already starting to deliver a set of policies from governments that could only have been described as pipe-dreams only a few months ago. Spain is planning to enact a Universal Basic Income (UBI) “as soon as possible”. Vancouver has announced a safe-supply of drugs with support from the Canadian federal government, in order to reduce opioid deaths. The United States has invoked the Defense Production Act to compel manufacturers to produce ventilators, a power that some have suggested should be used to aid in decarbonizing the US energy grid.

American revolutionary leader Thomas Paine proposed a Universal Basic Income in 1796.

Nothing is new about these ideas. European thinkers such as Thomas More were imagining Universal Basic Income back in the 1500s. In the North American context, proposals were being suggested hundreds of years ago by American revolutionary Thomas Paine, and economist Henry George. In Canada in the 1930s, Alberta Premier William Aberhart attempted to introduce a program, but failed due to opposition from the federal government. The Manitoba NDP ran a study in the 1970s, but never followed up on it in subsequent governments. Recently, in 2017 the Ontario Liberal Party government launched another pilot program that was quickly cancelled after the election of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party the next year. The Green Party of Canada has been advocating for UBI since their founding in the 1980s, and are currently arguing that the COVID19 pandemic shows it’s necessity.

A safe-supply of drugs has also been part of the Green Party of Canada’s platform for ages, but has long been resisted by Canada’s other major political parties. There have been attempts by advocates to convince Canada’s other parties to embrace the policy, such as at last year’s BC NDP convention, and the federal Liberal Party’s convention in 2018. It’s impossible to know if individual politicians personally opposed the idea, or if they actually were in favour of it but feared backlash from voters if they were to make it part of their public policy. Now, however, the door has been thrown wide open, and it’s possible that the current measures will become permanent once the pandemic has ended.

The US President enacting the Defense Production Act is one of the most surprising results of the pandemic, given the United State’s deific reverence of the “invisible hand” of the free market. The act allows the President to compel private manufacturers to produce products of national interest during a crisis, such as munitions during wartime. Willingness to use the act like this could open the door to a future President invoking the act to force the production of critical supplies for reducing carbon emissions.

There’s a concept in politics called “the Overton window”. It refers to the set of ideas and policies that are considered acceptable in mainstream discussion. In other words: the ideas that you can propose and discuss without getting labeled as a radical or an extremist. The window shifts over time as the public becomes aware of different ideas, and they stop seeming extreme and shocking. Much of politics is a push-and-pull by political advocates to try to move the window towards their set of ideas, so that they can get public buy-in and then win elections on a promise to enact them.

Illustration of the Overton Window, from Wikipedia.

Canada has a number of elections coming up in the near future. Saskatchewan is scheduled to go to the polls later this year, British Columbia in 2021, and then multiple provinces in 2022. The federal Green Party and the BC Greens are both in the midst of leadership contests, as are the federal Conservative Party and the Liberal Party of Newfoundland. We have a minority government in Ottawa, which means that we could always see an early election called before the official date, set for 2023. Now that the Overton window is widening, we may see a very different set of policies and ideas proposed in our next elections. COVID19 is bringing them into the mainstream.