The high cost of safety

National Post, 02 January 2020

What that price actually was in 2020 will be a key matter for investigation in 2021.

Back in the spring, when the coronavirus was first bearing down on Canada, I wrote a column about what a culture of safety looks like when encountering a pandemic. After a few decades of “safety first” on everything from construction sites to seat belts and bike helmets, there was no question that everything else would give way when safety was our top social priority — and everything else did.

There has been a remarkable consensus on the various pandemic restrictions. When a barbecue joint in Toronto defied the most recent lockdown, it occasioned thunderous maledictions and a massive police presence, mainly because there were no other miscreants to divide the public’s attention.

The ratcheting up of safety culture is partly a function of prosperity. Everyone wants to be safe, and if you can afford the cost of safety, why not pay it?

Yet figuring out that cost is tricky. Static analysis is conceptually easy — the extra railing costs this much, snow tires cost that much, the extra insurance rider is an additional $100. It’s painstaking, but with enough effort it can be done. We can measure how many fewer people die in car accidents in terms of kilometres driven, and the insurance industry can tell us how many of the safer, crash-absorbing cars they write off. Manufacturers know the marginal cost of the safety features. So the cost of safer cars can be (laboriously) estimated.

Dynamic analysis is fiendishly complicated, however. How many fewer decks are built because of more stringent safety requirements? How many fewer summer painting jobs are available because regulations require safety equipment most students cannot afford?

Intangibles make it more difficult still, because, by definition, they cannot be measured. What is the cost, in terms of loss of enjoyment and fostering a spirit of adventure, of building safer, but more boring playgrounds? Or, more to the point this year, what is the cost of dying alone? Or not having family visits? Or the emotional toll of losing a business?

In Alberta, more people have died from opioid overdoses in 2020 than from the coronavirus.

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