A Rare Moment of Cross-Partisan Consensus: Elite and Public Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Canada

Résumé analytique

The COVID-19 pandemic required an unprecedented effort to coordinate government and societal action, with individuals asked to voluntarily sacrifice economic and social activity to protect others. Public opinion tends to polarize on highly salient issues except when political elites are in consensus, and in the United States there was evidence of elite and public polarization on the pandemic's severity, undermining compliance with social distancing. Using a multimethod approach, this study shows that Canadian political elites and the public were instead in a unique period of cross-partisan consensus on the seriousness of COVID-19 and the necessity of social distancing.

The analysis draws on tweets from federal Members of Parliament (292 accounts, 33,142 tweets since January 1, 2020, with 1,260 COVID-19-related tweets qualitatively hand-coded), Google search trends for "coronavirus" aggregated at the municipal level (N = 87), and a national survey of 2,499 Canadian citizens fielded April 2 to April 6. MPs from all three major parties increasingly emphasized the crisis from early March onward, heavily and roughly equally stressed social distancing and hygiene measures, and produced no tweets downplaying COVID-19's severity or spreading misinformation. At the municipal level, Conservative party vote share showed no significant association with search interest in the coronavirus, which was instead driven by socio-economic (p < 0.001) and urban characteristics (p < 0.001). At the individual level, partisans of the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP did not differ significantly in COVID-19 risk perceptions or self-reported social distancing once ideology and demographics were accounted for, though nonpartisans scored lower. Ideology rather than partisanship did matter: moving across the full range of the left-right ideology index reduced perceived COVID-19 severity by 0.2 points (p < 0.01), with consistently left-wing respondents scoring 0.87 versus 0.71 for consistently right-wing respondents on the 0-1 severity scale, and online social distancing decreasing from 0.41 to 0.31 (p < 0.01), though offline social distancing was unaffected.

The authors conclude that, unlike in the United States, Canada's response to the coronavirus was not structured by partisanship, at least at that time, and argue that as the crisis continued and economic costs mounted it would be essential for Canadian parties to maintain a united front to avoid eroding this unique moment of societal consensus.