Who did what and when? The choice of public health measures and the timing of them offer some early lessons as a kind of “COVID-19 federalism” emerges. 

The data collected here captures measures enacted to counter the spread of COVID-19 (social distancing, fines, closures) and was inspired by work done in the US to allow cross-country comparisons. The picture that emerges is one of consensus on the essential measures that had to be put in place but also one with important variation in the timing of these measures.  

The dataset is currently being updated to reflect new measures and track measures that have been lifted through re-openings.

You can read more on these measures in our original Policy Options article.

To cite the dataset:

Breton, Charles and Mohy-Dean Tabbara. 2020. COVID-19 Canadian Provinces Measures Dataset. Center of Excellence on the Canadian Federation.

Other work using the dataset:

Armstrong, David A., Matthew J. Lebo, and Jack Lucas. 2020. “Do COVID-19 Policies Affect Mobility Behaviour? Evidence from 75 Canadian and American Cities.” Canadian Public Policy 46, no. S2: S127-S144.

Daoust, Jean-François, Richard Nadeau, Ruth Dassonneville, Erick Lachapelle, Éric Bélanger, Justin Savoie, and Clifton van der Linden. 2020. “How to survey citizens’ compliance with COVID-19 public health measures? Evidence from three survey experiments.” Journal of Experimental Political Science.