During the bleakest days of the pandemic, the movie Men in Black would periodically pop into my head. In the movie, the majority of people remain unaware that aliens exist among them, blissfully oblivious until something jolts them into reality.
COVID-19 was our jolt. It rocked us individually and shook our sense of security. Who would have thought we’d be jolted again less than five years later? A Trump administration bent on destabilizing a bilateral trade and diplomatic alliance envied the world over is shaking our vision of the world.
America’s old enemy Russia is suddenly being treated like a friend. NATO countries are being insulted and threatened. The world’s biggest superpower is talking about absorbing us.
Yes, it’s hard to shut your mind off at night.
But this new topsy-turvy reality could trigger a much more serious crisis for the long-term health of the economy, the funding engine of our social safety net.
We need to do what we didn’t quite get around to during and after the pandemic. We need transformational, coherent, and strategic thinking. We need planning that casts into the next 10, 20 years and beyond and asks: how will we build resilience?
One of the IRPP’s major ongoing initiatives, the Community Transformations Project, is looking at how communities in Canada might face disruption in the coming decades because of the global energy transition.
Tariffs will cause further hardships for some of those communities, many of which are rural and remote...
(Head over to LinkedIn to read the rest of Jennifer's post!)
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