Hugs, travel, sports – what Canadians are looking forward to in 2021

by David Korzinski | December 23, 2020 10:16 am

By Shachi Kurl, President

When tasked with writing these “what will 2021 yield” pieces, I find it both helpful (and humbling) to check first what I said about 2020.

Behold the last paragraph of last year’s last column: “… take these last days of 2019 just for you. Chill. Try to focus on the positive. Remember the things that are really important to you. Because the coming year is going to assault our senses, and sensibilities in ways we haven’t yet imagined. We’re going to need to be our best selves to withstand the onslaught.”

Golly – spoken like someone equipped with an otherworldly prescience I don’t actually posses. I can only suppose it was the kind of overwrought hand-wringing that end-of-year fatigue generally accompanies. Given what we’ve been through this year, and having peaked with the high dudgeon well before it came, what could one possibly say about the coming 12 months?

In part, it can only be better. Despite post-Christmas lockdowns and renewed anxieties over new variants of COVID-19, the delivery of the first tranches of vaccine into the country and the upper arms of Canadians have us daring to envision a post-pandemic world.

What are we looking forward to when (if) the dystopia dissolves away? Mostly, we are waiting to exhale. A late December study[1] from the Angus Reid Institute shows nearly half (44 per cent) excited about resumption of their ordinary life, being able to shop, run errands, just live in our communities without stress. Near equal numbers dream of the days we can offer hugs, handshakes, pecks on the cheek or any form of physical contact to those outside our households (43 per cent), while more dream of escapes abroad (42 per cent).

For the rest of this piece, please view it on the Ottawa Citizen’s site[2] where it was initially published.

Endnotes:
  1. late December study: http://angusreid.org/covid-back-to-normal/
  2. Ottawa Citizen’s site: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/kurl-hugs-travel-sports-what-canadians-are-looking-forward-to-in-2021

Source URL: https://angusreid.org/hugs-travel-sports-what-canadians-are-looking-forward-to-in-2021/