ST. JOHN’S – St. Patrick’s Day is so beloved in St. John’s that it’s a public holiday. A couple of weeks ago, bars and restaurants across this city – in a province referred to as the most Irish place outside Ireland – were planning days of festivities to celebrate the holiday.
A few days later all of those plans were cancelled. The government was urging people to stay inside, get back to the province and cancel the trips to Florida and Las Vegas that many here consider their reward for a long winter.
University and college staff returned to work after the holiday Monday to decide how to move the rest of the semester’s classes online in less than a week. Primary and secondary schools did not return from the holiday at all.
This scale and speed of change in daily life across Canada is unprecedented in our lifetimes. Every morning brings news of another way our lives have been restricted for our own safety. With that comes additional uncertainty about the future, for everything from our children’s education to our own jobs and economic stability.
Here in Canada’s most eastern province, we are just as shell-shocked as the rest of the country.
At the same time, we have a little bit of experience with this: In January, when three feet of snow fell on the province’s capital region, we found out what’s it like when your daily life changes dramatically overnight for reasons completely outside your control.
We’re no strangers to snow here in Canada’s snowiest city. But in St. John’s and its nearby towns in mid-January, we knew that an especially bad storm was on its way.
Meteorologists warned us that the combination of strong winds and heavy snowfall over a duration of hours would cripple the city. But I’m not sure who among us really grasped what we would wake up to on Saturday morning.
My next-door neighbour, a woman in her 70s, told me that in the 50 years she has lived on our street she had never seen it look as it did on January 18, 2020.
We woke up to a city covered in snow up to our waists, with seniors and people with disabilities trapped in their homes by drifts. The entire city was shut down, with a state of emergency declared and a curfew in place.
Over the first couple of days, hospitals, news stations and other essential services ran thanks to the hard work of the people trapped in their buildings overnight. The military was deployed to help dig people out of their homes, one by one.
Thousands of truckloads of snow had to be hauled out of the city and dumped in the ocean just to clear roads for vehicles. It took days for any stores to open at all, and it was more than a week before children returned to school.
What I believe – what I hope – will be the most enduring memory of what we refer to locally as Snowmageddon 2020 is the way it exposed the persistent cracks in our social fabric. It became starkly clear who among us had a job that would pay them during the state of emergency and who did not – and for whom the loss of a single week of pay was disastrous.
With food banks and kitchens closed, a Facebook group began to provide food to those who simply didn’t have what they needed in their homes. My neighbourhood corner store defied the state of emergency to open because, as the owner told me, people were calling her to say they didn’t have milk for their babies.
Snowmageddon also dealt a significant blow to local businesses, organizations, artists and the precariously employed. Winter is a slower time of year in St. John’s, and locals typically aren’t spending much in the weeks after Christmas.
A week of forced closures put many local operations at risk of going out of business they may not be able to recover from an extended period of reduced traffic or closures that threaten the important tourist season. And a lot of precariously employed people were still waiting for federal assistance that was supposed to make up for some of their lost wages when a global pandemic was declared.
Nobody can say yet what COVID-19 will mean for our local economy, let alone that of the province or country, in the end. But we do know it already means layoffs, reduced local spending and a lot of uncertainty.
It meant that here in January too. Workers deemed essential in Newfoundland (including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, other healthcare professionals, snowplow operators, phone operators, police officers, firefighters and paramedics) worked long hours, often for days at a time, and had to find ways into work even if their children were at home or roads were unpassable. At Memorial University, cafeteria staff stayed at work during the storm so students in residence could eat.
Many of those workers have unions, job protections and good wages – but not all do. For example, many essential employees in our health care system, from cleaning and kitchen staff on up to nursing staff, are part-time or casual employees who risk losing wages and their seniority if they refuse shifts.
Other workers went back on the job earlier than some, including employees at gas stations, grocery stores and convenience stores.
These employees are also often part-time workers who make minimum wage, don’t have paid vacation or paid sick time and were not necessarily paid for the days they did miss – but had to deal with anxious customers and long lines once they were back on the job.
Precarious workers or those who work at home could keep working, in some cases, but they had to do so with daycares and schools closed. Other gig-economy workers, like delivery employees, couldn’t do their jobs from home and lost out.
And many people simply lost a week of wages due to cancelled shifts, contracts that ended, shows that didn’t happen and tips that weren’t earned. Some employers paid their workers for missed shifts but others either could not or did not. For service employees, tips are more important than their hourly pay – and those were simply lost.
During Snowmageddon 2020, there wasn’t much many of us could do besides hunker down, try to follow the guidelines meant to keep us safe and wait for things to get better. But one of the things we could do, and that a lot of people did, was to help each other.
We can do that now too: by pushing for financial relief for those affected by COVID-19 by advocating for those risking their health to keep society going by ensuring the most vulnerable among us are protected and by remembering all of that when things do back to some kind of normal.
People who are unable to work remotely should have access to reliable child care and the equipment they need to do their jobs safely. Those who have lost work, full time or otherwise, due to COVID-19 should be provided with income supports and other financial measures like rent deferment and protection against eviction. And the most disadvantaged among us should have the security of a place to sleep, food to eat and access to health care if they need it – right now and always.
The snow will melt the virus will recede. But unless we put in the hard, sustained work to fix them, the inequalities both exposed will remain. Let’s do that work.
Terri Coles
@_terricoles
