Federalism, political leadership and the Covid-19 pandemic: explaining Canada’s tale of two federations

Abstract

In Canada, the federal government and the provinces responded comparatively successfully to the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the winter and spring of 2020. The opposite is true, however, for the second and third waves of the pandemic. While the four Atlantic provinces stuck to their proactive containment strategy with significant success, the other six provinces adopted a reactive mitigation approach. Although public health experts urged governments to change their strategy, the governments of the six provinces were reluctant. These policy choices in Canadian federalism correlated with profoundly different outcomes, with significantly higher case and death rates, as well as prolonged lockdowns, in those provinces that adopted a mitigation approach. Using a process-tracing design, this study shows that agency, conceptualized as political leadership, carries considerable weight to explain the emergence of two pandemic responses within Canadian federalism, with important implications for the overall policy performance. This finding suggests that the role of political leadership in federal systems requires more attention in future research.