Established by the President of the Royal Society of Canada in April 2020, the RSC Task Force on COVID-19 was mandated to provide evidence-informed perspectives on major societal challenges in response to and recovery from COVID-19.
The Task Force established a series of Working Groups to rapidly develop Policy Briefings, with the objective of supporting policymakers with evidence to inform their decisions.
COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of Canada’s crisis response infrastructure and policies. But it has exposed much broader and deeper systemic problems that flow from how we have chosen to organize our society. We have discovered the scale and depth of the Canadian precariat-those individuals and households who live with combinations of insecure income with little or no savings to rely on, employment, housing and residency which make for a profoundly and relentlessly insecure life. COVID-19 has shown us how the unintended creation of the precariat, through decades-long pursuit of lower labour costs, has created a large pool of individuals who simply cannot afford to follow policies that are essential for the good of society. COVID-19 has exposed the reality that our society and economy are two sides of the same coin.