As the one year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a pandemic arrives, it is increasingly apparent that not everyone is having a hard time: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon earned US$38 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2020 alone. The Guardian reports that Amazon’s share price is up 62 per cent over the past year, and Apple’s 70 per cent.

While the coronavirus has infected more than three-quarters of a million Canadians and taken more than 22,000 lives, the Canadian economy has also been devastated.

Statistics Canada reports “GDP growth rate declined by 2.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 and 11.5 per cent in the second quarter of 2020,” for an overall annual decline of 5.1 per cent. The federal debt alone is expected to be $380 billion for 2020–21.

Governments at all levels have taken on tremendous debt in order to provide economic stability and prevent a more dramatic collapse. We will be dealing with the financial consequences for generations. Ontario tabled a deficit of over $35 billion; its debt-to-GDP ratio is almost 50 per cent and is forecast to remain at historic highs for several more years.

While media attention has turned towards some Canadian politicians’ plans to remedy the fact that tech profits have ballooned while Canadian news media organizations are struggling to pay the bills, there has been comparably little attention on the future of funding our schools in Canada.

As a researcher who has studied some of the high educational and social costs of diminished public investment in schools, I am concerned we will soon hear the argument that mounting government debt requires either cuts to education or greater privatization. Even before the pandemic, a refusal to invest in public education on the basis of debt was a common refrain across provinces.

Pandemic profits

I believe it is it morally unjustifiable for tech companies to walk away from the pandemic with massive profits while schools are burdened with debt. This is doubly important considering the massive rise of online learning this year and schools’ increased reliance on tech platforms.

For example, at the beginning of April last year, Bloomberg reported that Google Classroom had “doubled active users to more than 100 million since the beginning of March.”

While a total picture of the precise profits derived from the huge expansion of tech into education this past year through a mass global rise of online learning is not yet clear, the many unknowns related to data privacy and how data could be used in years to come was flagged before the pandemic.