A couple of months after COVID-19 was officially recognized as a pandemic – five years ago today – Canada had recorded close to 60,000 confirmed cases, and more than 3,500 deaths. But by May of 2020, after weeks of lockdown isolation, disinfectant wipe hoarding, mute-button bloopers and home-schooling meltdowns, parts of the country were beginning to loosen some public-health restrictions.
At that cautiously optimistic moment, The Globe and Mail asked several reporters and contributors to forecast how COVID-19 would reshape society.
Today, we revisit their predictions to find out what they got right, what they got wrong – and what they never could have imagined.
Virtual health care would be here to stay
by Kelly Grant
When COVID-19 hit and lockdowns descended, Canada’s usually hidebound health bureaucracy made a lickety-split pivot to virtual care. Provincial health ministries opened fee codes so that, in many cases, doctors were paid the same amount for seeing patients by phone or video as they were for seeing them in person.
By April of 2020, about 60 per cent of health appointments were being conducted virtually, according to Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded non-profit that drives digital health. One Ontario study of billing records found that virtual care increased from 1.6 per cent of visits in the second quarter of 2019 to just more than 70 per cent in the second quarter of 2020.
Physicians and patients seemed to have embraced virtual care. That’s why The Globe predicted that the doctor would always be in – virtually – as an enduring legacy of the pandemic. Simon Hagens, the vice-president of performance at Infoway, agreed. Neither of us were quite right. “I made the assumption that it would become much more of the norm, and it would sort of persist over time,” Mr. Hagens said. “That is certainly a piece that I got wrong, for sure, in terms of the virtual visit component.”
Infoway and the Canadian Medical Association’s most recent national survey of physicians, conducted in 2024, found an estimated 81 per cent of medical visits occurred in person, up from 49 per cent in 2021. The return to in-person care was driven partly by the lifting of pandemic restrictions, and partly by the rolling back of emergency billing codes that facilitated virtual care in the first place. Ontario, for example, overhauled the way it paid doctors for phone appointments in December of 2022 to discourage the growth of virtual-only clinics
William Falk, a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute who wrote a 2021 report on virtual care for Health Canada, confessed he found it a “little depressing” that phone, video and text appointments are not the standard. “There was a sense in the mid-pandemic that we could change things for the better,” he said. “We did, for a while, open things up a long way. I think we showed what virtual care can do.”
For that reason, both he and Mr. Hagens of Infoway still see plenty of potential for care delivered by phone or video. Several Atlantic provinces have cut deals with virtual-care companies to deliver publicly funded primary care to people without family doctors. Newfoundland and Labrador is keeping rural emergency departments open during staffing shortages with nurses on site and physicians beamed in from away.
Doctors may not always be in virtually, but they’re available more now on your phone than they were before COVID.
Physical distancing markers, like this one at Ancaster High School in Ontario, were de rigeur in schools across Canada in 2020.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Online learning would fail
by Caroline Alphonso
Months before the world shut down and children were kept home from school, Ontario, led by Premier Doug Ford, rolled out a revolutionary plan for education. “Ontario Brings Learning Into the Digital Age,” blasted a November, 2019, press release, announcing a plan to require high school students take two online courses to graduate. It was a step, the government said, toward transforming the province into a “global leader of modern and digital education.” But it did not sit well with the teachers’ union. Negotiations on a new contract had collapsed; the union had engaged in job action.
Little did the Ontario government know that in a few months the entire country would be experimenting with online learning.
I was The Globe and Mail’s education reporter at the time, and had two young children attending virtual school. The e-mails from parents, both friends and work contacts, landed fast and furious. Technological glitches. Little ones dissolving into tears in front of their screens. Older kids disinterested in a virtual world where they couldn’t physically see their friends or teachers – or participate in extracurriculars.
Taking stock of the situation around me, I thought the experience would prove that online learning wouldn’t work for most students. For those who felt excluded or uncomfortable in their schools – those who were bullied or experienced racism or had anxiety or learning disabilities – an online classroom would be beneficial. But too many were disengaged and struggled with mental-health issues.
Five years later, the virtual school option has remained in place. But as we move further away from the height of the pandemic, families are also moving further away from online learning. The Toronto District School Board, for example, said 654 elementary students enrolled in remote learning this school year, down from 1,012 in 2023-24 and more than 2,200 in 2022-23. Similarly, just over 1,000 secondary students enrolled in virtual school this academic year, down from 1,400 the previous year. (High school students are still required to take two online courses to graduate, but they can opt out.)
At the end of the day, the accidental experiment with online learning made one thing crystal clear: There is no replacement for the interactions that come with being in a classroom.
Mid-sized cities would boom
by Matt Lundy
In 2020, we predicted that many Canadians – suddenly untethered from daily commutes – would ditch urban centres for more affordable mid-sized cities. It was, in large part, a bet on the demise of office culture and the persistence of Canada’s home affordability crisis.
We were somewhat on the mark. Places like Oshawa, Brantford and St. Catharines – all within a two-hour drive of downtown Toronto, traffic permitting – are drawing in thousands of people annually. This “drive til you qualify” trend wasn’t new, but it accelerated during the pandemic, when record-low mortgage rates prompted a surge in home sales and prices.
Remote work has endured, too. In November, around 20 per cent of people worked most of their hours from home, according to Statistics Canada.
But the story of the mid-sized city is more complicated. Just look at Moncton. Its census metropolitan area has grown by a whopping 21 per cent (or nearly 33,000 people) over the five years through mid-2024. In the early stages of the pandemic, thousands of people migrated to Moncton and the rest of Atlantic Canada in search of cheaper digs. Lately, however, growth is overwhelmingly driven by immigration. Moncton welcomed roughly 7,100 permanent residents in the most recent year – more than triple its usual pre-pandemic intake.
So yes, the mid-sized city is growing. But so too are urban centres and small towns. And generally speaking, this growth is tied to Canada’s largest population wave since the Baby Boom of the 1950s – not a relocation of the Laptop Class.
The expansion is coming to an abrupt end, however. The federal government is trying to freeze the Canadian population for two years because of concerns over housing availability and, in particular, the ranks of temporary residents will decline by nearly one million as Ottawa clamps down on visa issuance. Now many cities are poised to experience an unfamiliar trend: population decline.
Downtown Calgary would normally be full of commuters during the day, but not so in mid-March of 2020. Oil and gas companies here had to change tack quickly as the pandemic dragged down demand.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Variable dividends would catch on
by David Berman
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted business operations and – in some cases – the flow of dividends. A least a dozen Canadian companies, including Laurentian Bank of Canada, Suncor Energy Inc. and RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust, slashed their payouts as economic activity dried up in 2020.
Things looked so bleak that some observers began to contemplate a better approach: Companies should forget about promising a fixed regular payment to investors and instead embrace variable dividends.
That is, companies should distribute a percentage of their cash flows to shareholders.
It sounded like a good idea: Cash-strapped companies wouldn’t be pressured to pay a dividend they couldn’t afford, while thriving companies could reward shareholders without making long-term commitments to regular payments.
James Covello, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, told The Globe in 2020 that if just a couple of companies implemented variable dividends, the floodgates would open up.
But did variable dividends catch on? Well, a little.
A number of energy companies embraced the idea of connecting payouts to commodity prices, according to Howard Silverblatt, the S&P Dow Jones Indices senior index analyst.
“Some have set their dividend policy as a percentage of defined earnings or set three payments with the fourth payment variable,” Mr. Silverblatt said in an e-mail.
In Canada, Tourmaline Oil Corp. has taken a slightly different approach. The Calgary-based oil and natural gas producer distributes a modest fixed payment each quarter and then adds frequent special dividends when times are good.
Tourmaline distributed its first special dividend – 75 cents per share – in 2021. In 2022, it got serious: It made four special payments that added up to a whopping $7 a share, compared to a combined 90 cents a share in regular dividend payments.
Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. paid a special dividend of 75 cents a share in 2022 but since then has chosen to raise its regular payout by 50 per cent. Among U.S.-based energy producers, ConocoPhillips and Devon Energy Corp. have added variable dividends to their regular payouts.
But variable dividends have not caught on in a broader sense. Some dividend stalwarts, such as utilities, banks and telecoms, are reluctant to surrender a feature that investors appreciate: consistency.
Others, including Suncor, RioCan and Laurentian Bank, simply returned to raising their regular dividends when the economy recovered from the depths of 2020. Perhaps the next economic downturn will put variable dividends back on the table.
The market for online grocery markets would explode
by Susan Krashinsky Robertson
Even before lockdowns reinforced the value of shopping remotely, grocery e-commerce was a growing business. In 2019, the country’s largest grocer, Loblaw Cos. Ltd., hit the $1-billion mark for revenue from digital platforms for the first time, nearly doubling its sales from the year before. But COVID-19 made it clear to retailers that they needed to invest.
“It will accelerate us three to four years ahead of where it would have been otherwise,” Michael Medline, CEO of Sobeys parent company Empire Company Ltd. said back in the spring of 2020.
Fast forward to this past June, and Mr. Medline acknowledged the acceleration had been slower than imagined. The company was still losing money on its Voilà online service, and had pumped the brakes on its expansion.
But the prediction that grocers would see value in e-commerce proved to be true. Even compared to eye-watering numbers in 2020 – a year when both Loblaw and Metro Inc. reported their e-commerce businesses nearly tripled – sales have continued to grow. Loblaw, the only Canadian grocer to report dollar figures for e-commerce, saw online sales grow to $3.9-billion last year. Metro saw online sales increase by 45.6 per cent in 2024 compared to 2023, partly because the company has seen success with delivery partnerships with the likes of Uber Eats and Instacart.
That’s a lot of growth – albeit in a relatively small portion of the market. But retailers always expected that e-commerce would make up a minority of shopping trips. Part of the point of offering that convenience is to build loyalty, executives have said.
In fact, only 24 per cent of Canadians shopped only in person in 2024, according to research firm NielsenIQ, which tracks consumer packaged goods sales. The rest dipped their toes in online grocery shopping at least part of the time.
“With the vast majority of consumers shopping in both retail formats, it’s more important than ever that retailers keep shoppers engaged to win over both trip occasions,” said NielsenIQ’s vice-president of sales development, Carman Allison.
While growth might be slower than expected, Empire’s Mr. Medline told analysts last year that he remains “very optimistic” about e-commerce.
“We are becoming much more confident in the industry growing,” he said.
By the summer of 2020, movie theatres such as Toronto’s Queensway Cineplex adapted to COVID-19 restrictions with assigned seating, mandatory masking and stricter cleaning.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Movie theatres would show only mega-budget spectacles
by Barry Hertz
Over the past two decades, Hollywood has leaned on the Avengers and Justice League to save its skin. But during the pandemic, the movie biz turned to a different hero, one whose superpower wasn’t flight but an impeccable sense of taste: Christopher Nolan.
During COVID-19, it seemed as if the movie theatre era was entering its final days. With the shuttering of big-screen shrines and the rise of streaming, movie-going was facing an extinction-level crisis. Even when audiences felt safe to venture out, would they find anything to watch that felt worth the trouble?
At the time, I predicted that theatres, when they reopened, would become the domain of the mega-budget spectacle: high-gloss studio releases that exist only to move such ancillary products as toys, TV shows, toothbrushes. Anything for discerning, adult moviegoers would be relegated to the small screen.
Leave it to Mr. Nolan, then, to prove that all you need to do to save Hollywood is, well, make great movies.
In August, 2020, it was Mr. Nolan who first provided audiences (and studios) a path back toward the box office, by pushing Warner Bros. to release his sci-fi head trip Tenet into theatres. The experiment wasn’t a world-conquering success – the movie made US$58-million in North America, a fraction of what it would’ve likely brought in had it been released a year earlier – but it proved that there was still a light of promise flickering in that projection booth.
And so when Oppenheimer was released three years later – a movie that, released on the same day as Barbie, sparked a genuine portmanteau-worthy cultural phenomenon – it was Mr. Nolan again who cemented the reality that genuinely interesting and original movies, and the theatres that screen them, aren’t going anywhere. At least not while such adventurous, boundary-pushing artists like Mr. Nolan – including Greta Gerwig, Denis Villeneuve, Guillermo del Toro, Sean Baker and Coralie Fargeat – are around.
Safety protocols would alter the arts
by Marsha Lederman
Once the old adage that “the show must go on” was swiftly and brutally disproven by COVID-19, arts creatives got to work trying to bring their shows back – whatever that might look like.
Reopenings at art museums began with timed viewing slots and, often, a prescribed route through the exhibitions. Openings and artist talks went online for a while, some morphing into hybrid events. Now, in-person events are fully back – with few masks and little trepidation.
Live theatre’s return was more gradual and challenging, as sitting in a room, however large, with a bunch of strangers was anathema to the perils of the time. I predicted new safety protocols and simpler productions for live performances.
Indeed, socially distanced masked audiences were placed in staggered seating and Plexiglas barriers were erected in front of some stages. Shorter plays and cabarets persisted during the period of return. Casts and crews were bubbled. Programs became available by QR code.
Five years on, while attendance has not bounced back entirely, full-scale productions are back. Going to the theatre feels just like it used to in the Before Times.
At the Arts Club Theatre Company in Vancouver, one piece of the back-to-normal puzzle remains: opening night post-show receptions are still on hold. “That’s mainly to protect the cast,” says the company’s Peter Cathie White. But it looks like those gatherings will be back this year, too.
Illness is a huge concern for theatre companies. The use of understudies is now more common. When Mirvish, for instance, mounted The Lion King in 2000, there were about 30 cast members. In the current production, the same one, there are 51.
People don’t come to the theatre sick any more – performers, crew, even audiences. “I don’t remember when last I heard someone cough in a show,” says Ann Swerdfager at the Stratford Festival.
COVID-19 brought a big financial boost to esports tournaments such as 2021's PGL Counter-Strike Major event in Stockholm. By that fall, Sweden's COVID-19 restrictions were not an obstacle to the competition, though infected players could be disqualified.Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images
Esports would go mainstream
by Simon Houpt
Sports fans used to laugh at esports, scratching their heads at the notion of watching people play video games for a living, and mocking the idea that twitchy-fingered basement dwellers could be called athletes. Then came the global shutdown of sports, and within weeks even actual athletes were hitting the consoles and livestreaming themselves. As The Globe noted in the spring of 2020, experts were predicting that COVID would finally slingshot esports into mainstream respectability.
Investors rushed in, sponsoring teams playing Overwatch, Counter-Strike, League of Legends, and Valorant. (If none of these ring a bell, ask a friend who’s under 25 to explain them to you.) As with many pandemic-era activities, a bubble ensued: in February, 2021, the share price of OverActive Media, a Toronto-based esports company, hit $2.70. These days, it’s down about 90 per cent from that high, bumping along in the $0.25 range.
But while the esports economy has cratered, the spirit of esports is now embedded in the traditional sports industrial complex. Legacy sports leagues such as the NBA have esports divisions of teams that play video game versions of their real-life sports, while others are changing their games to suit the attention spans of younger generations: Major League Baseball introduced a clock in 2023 to cut down on time between pitches and speed up games.
Looking for more proof of mainstream success? Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that Saudi Arabia would host the inaugural Olympic Esports Games in 2027. And in January, Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods, in partnership with the PGA, launched what they’re calling TGL (Tomorrow’s Golf League), which stages twice-weekly prime time matches of pros stalking an indoor sound stage in Palm Beach and hitting balls into a massive screen. Ratings began promisingly and then softened – though they may rise again for the playoffs, which kick off March 17 – but with 42 per cent of its audience in the 18-49 year-old range, TGL’s viewership is younger than each of the four major men’s sports leagues.
Our kids will lead the way to the future, whether you want them to or not.
Ottawa would prevail over the provinces
by Konrad Yakabuski
Throughout Canada’s history, major economic crises have typically resulted in an expansion of federal power at the expense of the provinces. Ottawa has a greater ability to borrow than most provinces, and it has drawn on its fiscal flexibility to step up in tough times.
This was particularly true during the pandemic, when the federal government dished out more than $400-billion in aid to individuals and businesses, accounting for 86 per cent of all pandemic-related spending by Ottawa and the provinces. The crisis also exposed gaps in long-term care delivered by the provinces that led to calls for more federal health care funding and the creation of national standards in seniors’ care.
The Globe predicted that COVID-19 would cause a permanent shift in the balance of power and, five years later, this does appear to have occurred. Major social spending initiatives are more than ever the exclusive purview of the federal government.
Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ottawa moved to introduce a national pharmacare program, $10-a-day daycare and publicly subsidized dental care for low-income Canadians. The sustainability of these programs is far from assured. Much will depend on whether future governments pick up where Mr. Trudeau left off. If they do not, these programs may not survive.
As a result of its COVID-19 spending spree, the federal government took on far more debt than the provinces. Overall, combined federal and provincial net debt rose to more than 75 per cent of gross domestic product from around 53 per cent before the 2008 financial crisis. Higher debt and interest rates have left both levels of government with much higher interest costs, which will eat into tax revenues for years to come.
A panel of experts consulted by the C.D. Howe Institute has recommended that combined federal and provincial debt levels be reduced by 10 percentage points of GDP over the next decade “to ensure that fiscal policy can be used to cushion the effects of future economic crises.” But any such fiscal consolidation could be derailed by a major recession, such as the economic downturn that could be caused by U.S.-initiated global tariff war.
While both Ottawa and the provinces have relatively less financial firepower than before the pandemic, the federal government is more dominant than ever. And when the next crisis comes, Canadians will undoubtedly look to Ottawa to get them through it.
Perspective on the pandemic: More from The Globe and Mail
Twelve months into the pandemic, The Globe checked in on a mostly remote team of journalists to hear how their lives changed and what they hoped would be different after the crisis. Here's what they told us.
The Globe and Mail