COVID-19 Stringency Index

Canadian provinces and territories took highly divergent approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic. One year into the pandemic, we can now provide a snapshot of the relative severity of the policies introduced in response to the pandemic.

We followed the team at Oxford University’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, who have been tracking the different approaches taken by countries since the beginning of the pandemic. Our index captures twelve different measures enacted by Canadian provincial governments including gathering sizes, masks, school closures, and travel restrictions. You can read more about how relative stringency has varied in our original Policy Options article, published on November 27, 2020.

The Centre data and the Oxford University’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker have now been combined to produce a joint working paper Variation in the Canadian provincial and territorial responses to COVID-19.

Download the data:

• Github
• Updated April 9: COVID-19 Stringency Index.csv

To cite this data:
Breton, Charles, Paisley Sim and Mohy-Dean Tabbara. 2021. COVID-19 Canadian Provinces Measures Dataset. Center of Excellence on the Canadian Federation. Montreal. Institute for Research on Public Policy.

One year later: A snapshot of the Canadian response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The thumbnails below provide a snapshot of how provincial measures have varied one year into the pandemic and how these measures compare to the evolution of Covid-19 cases. These graphs will be updated from time to time, but the data is updated weekly.