Nothing concentrates the mind like a crisis — or a lot of them landing at once

The word "crisis" was mentioned in the House of Commons 1,747 times in 2021.

That's the second-highest total for a single year in the past 28 years, which is as far back as Open Parliament's searchable database of Hansard extends. It's surpassed only by last year, when "crisis" was spoken in the Commons 1,839 times.

In only two other years — 2008 and 2009, the years of the Great Recession — was the word "crisis" uttered by MPs more than a thousand times. From 1994 through 2000, it got mentioned an average of 405 times per year.

A once-in-a-century pandemic certainly counts as a crisis, and that obviously helps to explain the uptick. But COVID-19 is not the only crisis MPs have identified in the last 12 months.

The word also has been used to describe opioid addiction, inflation, the cost of housing, mental health, labour shortages, the fall of Afghanistan, the state of long-term care, sexual misconduct in the Canadian Forces and, of course, climate change.

After the throne speech last month, the Conservatives tabled an amendment that would have formally recognized a "cost of living crisis" and a "housing crisis," as well as a "national unity crisis."

Earlier this month, Bloc Quebecois MP Denis Trudel stood in the House and reported that "we are currently seeing several crises in Canada. Not only is there the health crisis, the climate crisis and, in Quebec, the language crisis, but there is also the housing crisis."

It's possible the times are having an inflationary effect on political rhetoric, that the stress of the last two years is pushing politicians to speak in more dramatic terms. Social media also seems to offer a powerful incentive to emotional language. And "crisis" might just be a fashionable term that eventually will go out of style.

But perhaps the pandemic — while exacerbating some pre-existing problems — has made us more attuned to the other problems around us. Perhaps it has lent new urgency to all sorts of things.

In the case of climate change, the pandemic has offered instructive parallels. It also has coincided with a run of wildfires, storms and heat waves that proved the next great existential crisis is already here.

It can all seem rather daunting taken together — particularly at the end of another long year and as another new variant washes over the globe. And all of these challenges are converging at a sensitive moment for Western democracy.

In its submission to the Summit of Democracy hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden last week, the Liberal government wrote that the world's democracies "need to renew dialogue within our countries to demonstrate that democracy remains the system best suited to serve all people, protect the most vulnerable and generate greater resilience."

That echoes Biden's own stated desire to prove that democracy can still "deliver."  

Tangentially related to that is Trudeau's claim that "cynicism" on the political left might threaten the idea of progressive government (however biased an observer the prime minister might be).