canadians keen to get back to the future after covid: poll
as covid-19 seems to be abating and canada looks with hope and trepidation to the future, a new poll reveals the activities we are hoping to do more — and less
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as the covid-19 pandemic settled in last spring, the national post and pollster john wright, executive vice president of maru public opinion, compiled “a day in the life”, a schedule of the average canadian’s day in newly familiar lockdown.
it showed that canadians had found a new equilibrium of sorts, with clear new patterns of waking up uncertain what day it was, working from home in uncomfortable chairs, taking frustration out on their housework and then going for a walk. it showed how the pandemic changed how canadians ate, bathed, shopped for groceries and socialized, and what they watched on screens while not scrolling for updates on the global doom.
now, as covid-19 seems to be abating and canada looks with hope and trepidation to the future, half-expecting it to be just the way we left it, the post and wright have compiled “a week in the after-life,” a schedule of the average canadian’s week post-pandemic, based on their expectations today, one year later.
like the time traveller marty mcfly, canadians are using cutting-edge science to go back to the way it was, only to find it different. the key question that faces them, as wright put it in an interview, is “what is going to stick?”
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“if this had been 1999, i think society would have collapsed,” he said. but there was some good fortune among the bad, including widely accessibly technology that facilitated adapting to lockdown. so canadians are not so much looking to return to the way things were, but seeking stability in a new normal, and anxious for society to keep up with their own forced adaptions.
as a result, wright sees a comparison between the present moment and the invention of the steam engine. transformation is in the air. “we’re walking out into the sunshine of an altered society,” he said.
the average post-pandemic week seems to begin, as usual, in this spirit of optimistic uncertainty.
monday means getting back to work, and the survey suggests the average canadian intends to do just that, which is not to say they actually plan to go anywhere.
the pandemic has rapidly created a new working culture, in which localized workplaces have become dispersed workforces. if you consider only the millennial generation’s responses, 42 per cent intend to work from home more. some are keen to get back to the workplace, and 17 per cent of canadians at large intend to work from home less after the pandemic, but a larger proportion intend to do it more. fully 37 per cent of canadians intend to work less in an office with colleagues close by, and a mere nine per cent intend to do it more.
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this has downstream effects on, for example, starbucks and tim hortons, which will have to reckon with the roughly one-third of canadians who intend to make their coffee at home more than before the pandemic. restaurants and lunch cafés will similarly feel the effects of the more than one third of canadians who intend to cook more at home rather than going out.
tuesday is a good day for errands and appointments, but not by public transit, which nearly 40 per cent intend to take less. more than one in four canadians intend to use telehealth more often for medical appointments, a share that rises to well over one in three for millennials. the same goes for mobile banking, in which a solid 37 per cent of canadians intend to “seriously set money aside for potential future emergencies,” rising to more then 50 per cent among only millennials.
wednesday is often the busiest day work-wise, but that will likely not involve business trips. 36 per cent of people intend to travel less for work, and 47 per cent say they will go to conferences less.
canadians seem keen to keep up their physical activities, according to the survey, so thursday might involve playing some sports outdoors, which a modest 15 per cent of canadians expect to do more of, but 34 per cent expect to play less indoor sports like squash, basketball and bowling. fewer than one canadian in ten says they will go to the gym more. on the balance, the pandemic walk looks set to outlast the pandemic itself.
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friday is for night life, but the numbers suggest this is not going to involve seeing a movie in a theatre, a large sporting event, a play or a musical performance, which about one-third of canadians say they will do less of.
saturday will present interesting contrasts when friends and families get together again. for example, 23 per cent of canadians intend to do more hugging and hand-shaking with their friends, perhaps to make up for lost opportunities, but 39 per cent intend to do less, which could create awkward and anxious situations.
sunday is traditionally for rest and reflection. wright said the pandemic has made some people more spiritual, while forcing others to abandon a church-going routine they were used to. one quarter of canadians say they will attend church less, but 10 per cent say they will do it more, which jumps to 16 per cent among only millennials.
the survey was conducted online over two periods in late april and early may, 2021, a year after the previous one. there were 1,012 respondent canadians in the first and 1,508 in the second, weighted by education, age, gender and region, according to the census. because they were not randomly selected, a true margin of error cannot be calculated, but a randomized poll with a similar number of respondents would have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 per cent to 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
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for impressionistic purposes, however, the survey is an eye-opener. wright calls it a “thermometer of where we’re headed.”
some things people plan to do more of after the pandemic than before make sense, like washing hands (56 per cent) and avoiding large crowds (46 per cent). some things people say they will do less of also make sense, like going on a cruise (37 per cent) or eating at a buffet (44 per cent). but the curious results are the ones where the intentions are split, like going to the movies. some expect to do it more (17 per cent), and some less (35 per cent). it shows not everyone is on the same page.
there is also a generational split, with millennials consistently outstripping the general population in how much more they want to do things, from online shopping and saving for emergencies, to church and outdoor sports. they are the “ascendant marketplace,” as wright puts it, and they are impatient. new york magazine devoted its current cover to a story on the return of fomo, or fear of missing out, which “might have gone into hibernation for a while, but we may now be on the way to a new golden age as we try to make up for the year we lost by doing more than ever.”
this rushed and panicked uncertainty, with today’s intentions running into tomorrow’s reality, is likely to create new nostalgias for times when things seemed more settled, even for the intensely unsettling pandemic itself. people have always pined for the past as much as they long for the future.
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as the world moves toward re-opening, there is a newly prominent strand of thought that mocks those who are reluctant to emerge from lockdown, as if they are indulging in some over-emotional frippery by clinging to their artificial isolation, finding themselves changed by it, even sometimes for the better. an american psychiatrist went so far as to medicalize it with the diagnosis of “cave syndrome,” as if people were literally sick in the head.
this a too casual dismissal of a universal condition, though, which post-pandemic life is starting to illustrate. finding meaning in suffering is not a psychiatric symptom, and it is not an endorsement of suffering. it is an endorsement of humanity, and it will be a major theme of the post-pandemic future, just as it always has been.
likewise, the passage of time rarely brings people back to where they were, a lesson that is forgotten as often as it is learned. for canadians, today’s future is not what it was in the before times.
“a year turns very quickly, and does not give back the same,” reads the 14th century middle english chivalric poem sir gawain and the green knight, the story of an impossible challenge overcome in a calendar year. “the beginning to the ending very seldom matches.”
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