Harvest 2021 has been painful. Soybeans were interrupted by rain. The dream of an early planted wheat crop vanished, stolen by untimely rains. Many farmers are like us with just ‘one more day’ of corn left out there waiting to be picked. Harvest is an interesting period; it is joyful in the sunny days of October but can turn desperate with the short days of December. It is as if things can change on a dime – something that is seemingly perfect followed by chaos for no particular reason.
Such is trying to raise kids in Ontario. It seems sunny before the thunderclouds mass in the distance and threaten a dispiriting downpour. So many people talk in dismal terms when discussing the experiences of their children over the past months yet almost all are afraid to speak their truth for fear of retribution. Given the broken spirit of people, it was no surprise to see Huron Perth Public Health reach towards the lever of school closure when faced with cases of COVID-19 at Elma Township Public School (ETPS) recently.
Once upon a time I was an applied economist… before the pig farming and politics, I sat in enough classrooms at the University of Guelph that they even gave me some fancy papers for mastering that dismal science. I decided to put those old degrees to work because it is no longer acceptable for people to blindly submit without doing a proper accounting of their own sacrifices. Local demographic, household income, and health data was compiled to determine the impact of local COVID school closures and the results are nothing if not sad.
Total economic output was the first number that really jumped out in the model. It was estimated that 15 people were unable to fulfill professional obligations due to the initial classroom and bus closures. That number expanded to 58 people when the entire school was closed. Lost output is experienced differently depending on the profession and is not necessarily tied to wage loss. The salesperson who was forced to take 10 days off from the road may not lose their base wage, but it is 10 days of not servicing current clients or finding new ones. It is this type of loss that we can pick up by looking at output. In the case of the initial shutdown it was estimated that total output was reduced by ~$682,000.
Economic output is not something many of us think about given none of us pay our bills in something abstract like output, they are paid in cash that we either earn as wages or as business profits. So let’s talk about lost wages. Significant wage losses were likely limited to 14 or 15 families but may have been as high as 19 families depending on the employment mix of the actual households impacted.
To be conservative let’s proceed using the lowest number of 14 families, but first a little explainer on wage losses. Wage loss clusters in lower wage level jobs for a variety of reasons. Salaried positions with sick days, lieu time, flex time, etc. largely reside in sectors like finance, legal education, etc. where salaries outstrip service sectors and most trades. This flexibility has allowed people to navigate things like a school closure without experiencing wage loss. That is not to say that they may not experience something like burnout because they log in at 9:30 after the kids are asleep to try and get four or five hours of work done, but there is a paycheque in the mailbox every other week.
For the people who do not have that flexibility the calculus is simple – don’t work, don’t get paid. And in some cases, it can mean your job is no longer there when you are able to go back. For the 14 families in our model, it is almost certain that the majority have a household income of less than $50,000 (over 30 per cent of households in our area have a total annual income of less than $50K) and one or two of them will have a total annual income of less than $20,000. In terms of wage loss, the total amount lost was estimated to be $24,228. Let’s unpack what it means.
For simplicity’s sake we will divide the lost wages equally across households, each one losing $1,731. Consider this: according to the United Way Perth-Huron data from the Living Wage network, a Huron-Perth family of four needs income of $4,358 for housing, food, transportation and childcare every month. A household at the maximum annual income in our sample here would have a monthly income of $4,166 in a full employment scenario. A sad reality is that over a third of families in our area have absolutely no room for failure when things are going right, forget during a pandemic. By taking away the ability of these households to work, Huron Perth Public Health gave them the following impossible choices:
– Go without groceries
– Miss a rent/mortgage payment
– Ask someone for financial help
– Lie and break COVID protocol, risking charges or fines
We can leave it to you the reader to decide what you would do, but regardless of the pathway taken; it is inhumane to take away the dignity of people like that. It is unacceptable that we continue to be blind to these things.
While the model was constructed specifically for the initial ETPS shutdown, the economic output losses were estimated again to try and capture the partial shutdowns at Westfield Elementary and public daycare. It was estimated that 147 people were not able to fulfill their professional obligations over the impacted period with an output cost of over $1.7 million. A story for another day, but those who are concerned with inflation should be zeroing in on these labour disruptions as a primary driver.
When schools are closed to limit the spread of COVID it is not a public health decision; it is a COVID prevention decision. Public health implies that every variable is being considered and that means a strong focus on the economic impacts. Consider the following statement, taken directly from the Government of Canada in their definition of public health: “The population health approach recognizes that health is a capacity or resource rather than a state, a definition which corresponds more to the notion of being able to pursue one’s goals, to acquire skills and education, and to grow.”
Being sick with COVID, like any other disease is a real thing and in certain cases it can be deadly but make no mistake it is a state…a specific period in time. Our societal obsession with preventing the spread of COVID has resulted in an outcome where our population’s capacity has been reduced, where our goals have been muted, and our children’s education stolen. The very opposite of preserving public health.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stewart@stonaleenfarms.ca or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
