For there to be cause for hope, there must first be cause for worry. One is the flip side of the other, a dawn breaking the dark, green shoots emerging after a destructive forest fire. Last year certainly provided ample scope for worry: inflationary pain, a housing crisis, two bloody regional wars and a resurgence of antisemitic hate.
Faced with all of that, it might seem wishful thinking, bordering on the willfully naive, to talk about the positives emerging from last year. But there is always cause to hope, if you look hard enough.
A soft landing: Yes, the surge in inflation and the resulting spike in interest rates have been painful for many Canadian households, and even worse than that for some. But the Canadian economy has, so far, avoided the even deeper pain of high unemployment that has accompanied inflation-dampening efforts in previous decades.
A deep recession was the result when the Bank of Canada pushed to extinguish inflation in the early 1990s, with unemployment peaking at 12.1 per cent in November, 1992. In November, 2023, the rate was 5.2 per cent. That means hundreds of thousands of workers kept their jobs.
A start to fixing the housing crisis: On a similar note, there are early signs of a turnaround in the policy failures that sent housing prices and rents into the stratosphere in 2023. Ottawa and provincial governments have been shaken from their complacency and have begun to implement policies that address the core issue of anemic growth in supply. As well, governments have moved away from measures that subsidized demand and ended up making the problem worse.
It will take years to redress the imbalance in housing supply that has caused so much grief in the last couple of years. The good news is that governments have – belatedly – laid the foundation for finally addressing the housing crisis.
The comeback of the cinema: It might not have been 2023′s biggest problem, but the stupefied state of movie-making was irksome. Colour-by-number sequels seemed to be the only films that Hollywood could conceive of. Box-office returns sagged; movie-goers became movie-goners.
Then came Barbenheimer, the summer phenomenon of the refreshingly fun Barbie and the awe-inspiring Oppenheimer. You didn’t have to be a fan of either (although millions were) to appreciate the power of original storytelling, and a long overdue break with threadbare sequels. The lesson: True creativity can still captivate the imagination.
A natural success story: The snail’s pace of dealing with the increasingly urgent issue of climate change might make it seem that there is no political will to act to protect our environment.
But British Columbia and Ottawa have shown that progress can be made, albeit on other fronts, in inking a Nature Agreement in partnership with First Nations that creates a $1-billion fund to pay for conservation efforts in the province, with the aim of doubling the amount of protected area. (B.C. has the greatest biodiversity in Canada – but also has the most species at risk.)
The federal and B.C. governments will need to get to work dispensing that money to hit their ambitious goal. But the fund is a hopeful start, and a demonstration of what co-operative federalism can achieve.
The wonders of science: The advances last summer in understanding the muon, a subatomic particle that begins to decay almost as soon as it is created, might not have looked like a big deal to the layperson. Scientists announced in August that they had come up with a more exact measurement of how muons deviate from what would be expected when subjected to magnetic forces.
That might seem painfully incremental but for one thing: those August results (building on a 2021 experiment) could open the door to a rethinking of the Standard Model of particle physics, the overarching theory of how the components of matter interact.
It’s a small but important discovery that could one day lead to a theory that unifies all the known phenomena in nature – a Theory of Everything. Scientists, including Albert Einstein, have been pursuing that goal for decades.
The world of science has kept at it, year after year, in the belief that humans will eventually be able to decode the fundamental mysteries of the universe. Such ambition requires a deep-rooted belief in the power of the human mind – in a word, hope.