The universe, in all its terrible beauty, has a way of presenting us with as many opportunities as it takes to learn life’s most fundamental lessons.

Not least of these – recent days have again shown — is that there really are few rock-ribbed conservatives in times of economic extremis, few implacable government-haters when calamity strikes, not many of us who are truly self-reliant or agree, deep down, with Sartre’s proposition that hell is other people.

If little good has come from COVID-19, it might be noted that the virus killing and sickening people around the world and throttling the global economy has at least turned the worst of strident right-wingers across Canada into heirs of Tommy Douglas, David Lewis and Ed Broadbent.

Why, there was Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer fretting on the CBC about people in precarious work and those who might “fall through the cracks.”

There was Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe saying “we need to look after one another” and “we will get through this together.”

There was Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre less concerned, for the moment at least, with the state of the books than he was about immediate government help for vulnerable citizens and small businesses.

There was Dan Kelly, president and CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, demanding more government “lifelines” than the $27 billion announced by the federal government this week.

There was Ontario Premier Doug Ford, lavishly praising the public service and the heroism of front-line workers.

And there, astonishingly, were some of this country’s leading climate-change-deniers and scoffers at science pleading with citizens to heed the warnings of medical experts or we’re all in peril.

Imagine! A blessed period in human affairs when politicians happily yield to medical officers of health, when epidemiologists replace partisan spin doctors on political chat shows, when government leaders frankly acknowledge they don’t know what will happen next.

All across the country, premiers of right-wing bent were eagerly praising the actions and judgment of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, declaring that “we’re all in this together.”

It was as if the conservative vanguard in Canada had suddenly taken up Bob Marley’s One Love as its anthem.

As if they now adhered to the wisdom of the ancients, that the greatest joy comes from helping others, that we will be judged according to how we treat the most vulnerable among us.

Happily, the obscurantism and toxic partisanship that were fouling the political system here and around the world have been eclipsed by the needs of the hour.

Equally happily, it’s a development that might be difficult to reverse once the crisis has passed.

How do these fans of science, these born-again socialists, these preachers of the family-of-(wo)man go back to the antediluvian antics and attitudes of their recent pasts?

How do they return to the cynical rhetoric that divides, sneer at other levels of governments, or give oxygen to Margaret Thatcher’s noxious observation that there is “no such thing as society.”

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What the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 has already reminded us is that we are herd animals. Relationships define us. Healthy bonds and social life are key indicators of happiness and well-being.

To lose all those daily interactions, the easy community and sociability is to lose a great deal, and the depth of sudden isolation and loneliness can shock us.

As Joni Mitchell famously noted, we don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone. Or quarantined, or self-isolated, or socially distanced.

The virus has reminded us how small the world is, how connected we all are, how helpless we can be in the face of large challenges, how much we turn to government in times of crisis, how much we need each other.

From all places on the political spectrum have come pleas and exhortations sufficiently compassionate that they might have fit, a little more than 30 years ago, into Bob Rae’s manifesto “What We Owe Each Other.”

Rae, at the time, was leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, and had embarked on a period of deep introspection.

He had been through a rash of personal tragedies, the deaths of his in-laws in a car crash, his father’s cognitive growing dementia, his brother’s death to cancer. As often happens, the pain of loss brings perspective.

“Of all the political values I know there is one less talked about and understood than others,” Rae wrote.

“And that value is love. Not a love that is abstract or the love of the romantics. But the love we owe each other in a world that is too often cold and hostile.”

Add virus-threatened to that description of the planet and, 30 years later, just about every conservative in the country is signing on to the notion that what we owe each other, above all, is solidarity, generosity, kindness. Love.