In an odd way, Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine is the photo negative of the pandemic: while COVID-19, as a public-health emergency, was always going to see most of the important public policy happen at the provincial level, the war in Eastern Europe \u2014 and the primary role of diplomacy and military policy \u2014 has put the federal government front and centre. It will be decisions made around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s cabinet table or in the House of Commons, not decisions made by Premier Doug Ford or Queen\u2019s Park, that largely decide events. But reality doesn\u2019t obey the neat lines drawn by the Constitution, and the place called \u201cOntario\u201d is still entirely inside the place called \u201cCanada,\u201d so the literal shockwaves from blasts in Ukraine will have figurative ripples here.<\/p>\n
On the matter of the humanitarian tragedy, Ontario will need to house the refugees who will arrive here in as-yet-unknown numbers: just literally housing them will be a challenge on its own, given this province\u2019s existing housing shortage. As the still only weeks-old war has already expelled more than 2 million people from Ukraine into other countries, mostly Poland, the idea of Canada receiving tens of thousands of refugees is something both the federal government and Ontario will need to plan around. Canada has received more than 70,000 Syrian refugees in the years since 2015. A similar influx of Ukrainians might be easier to manage for one reason: there\u2019s already a very large (and politically active) Ukrainian-Canadian community here to welcome new arrivals. However many arrive here, they will need all the services that government provides, including health care and education, and we\u2019ll need to figure out how to accommodate that at least over the medium term.<\/p>\n You can count on TVO to cover the stories others don\u2019t\u2014to fill the gaps in the ever-changing media landscape. But we can\u2019t do this without you.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n But the effects of the war are not going to be limited to the flow of desperate people out of the region. Probably the most immediate and visible effect: the cost of oil and gasoline, which has been driven even higher than it already was. We don\u2019t need to dwell on this too much. Suffice it to say that governments are keenly attuned to the price of gasoline because it has a direct impact on whether they get re-elected. The Doug Ford government has already taken one step to address the high cost of driving, by\u00a0\u00a0removing license-plate sticker fees<\/a>. It won\u2019t be shocking if it tries to do something more in the coming spring budget.<\/p>\n There have been many oil shocks since the early 1970s, but it\u2019s notable that this one is occurring at precisely the moment where we\u2019re seeing a surge of investment in alternatives to oil and gas for both transportation (electric vehicles) and home heating (with electric heat pumps). Europe \u2014 which is more directly tied to Russia\u2019s oil exports than is North America\u2014 is already scrambling to reduce its dependence on Russian hydrocarbons; in Ontario, the impulse is going to be more about protecting consumers from high prices. But we shouldn\u2019t discount the possibility that policies from Europe will spread beyond their specific context: if countries like France and Germany make a concerted push to wean consumers off oil and gas where they aren\u2019t strictly necessary, that will provide a model that other governments may eventually choose to follow.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Russia doesn\u2019t export just oil and gas; it\u2019s a major source of any number of raw materials that global markets will now be looking for alternative sources of. The prices of everything from wheat to nickel are going through the roof right now, and while that\u2019s bad news for consumers, it could also spur investments in northern Ontario, where companies have been trying to sell visions of new mineral development to help feed global lithium-battery demand. The Ring of Fire, a major nickel and chromium deposit in Ontario\u2019s northwest, has been\u00a0languishing under both Liberal and PC governments for more than a decade now<\/a>. It\u2019s a fiendishly complicated file involving questions of northern infrastructure and Indigenous rights, but moments like the current crisis also have a history of sweeping away complexity if governments decide the need for (in this case) new resources is urgent enough.<\/p>\n One area it\u2019s difficult to see the war against Ukraine affecting: the coming election campaign. The support for Ukraine\u2019s side in the war has been so unanimous among the major parties at the legislature that it\u2019s difficult to imagine it being the kind of issue that will divide voters. Instead, we\u2019ll be reacting to the second-order effects of the conflict in the weeks, and months, and possibly even years to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,’script’,’https:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/fbevents.js’);fbq(‘init’, “756679924783003”);fbq(‘track’, “PageView”);fbq(“track”, “ViewContent”, {“content_name”:”How will events in Ukraine ripple through Ontariou2019s economy and politics?”,”content_type”:”article”,”content_ids”:[“513697”]}); In an odd way, Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine is the photo negative of the pandemic: while COVID-19, as a public-health emergency, was always going to see most of the important public policy happen at the provincial level, the war in Eastern Europe \u2014 and the primary role of diplomacy and military policy \u2014 has put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[45],"tags":[795,825,6001,802,265,4088],"class_list":["post-10075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ripple","tag-economy","tag-events","tag-ontarios","tag-politics","tag-ripple","tag-ukraine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/cp151879228.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10077,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10075\/revisions\/10077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/assets.tvo.org\/prod\/s3fs-public\/media-library\/studio_pic.jpg?bACOfjo_OtSm4o_o0UxGUrXdJEmg6XhA?fid=24488\" "\\"\\"")
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