COVID-19 Provincial Policies
Canadian provinces and territories responded differently to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the beginning of the pandemic the Centre has developed and updated an index to evaluate provincial responses. The Centre index captures seventeen different measures enacted by Canadian provincial governments including gathering sizes, masks, school closures, and travel restrictions.
Download the data:
- Github
- COVID-19 Stringency Index.csv: updated September 20, 2022
Vaccine requirements and public health measures
The Centre Stringency Index continues to evolve with the pandemic. As provincial governments introduce new restrictions tied with vaccination status, we added new indicators to the index (see codebook).
As a result, the dataset now includes three different indices. ‘stringencyIndex’ includes all measures and is the one depicted in the figure above, ‘stringencyPHM’ includes all public health restrictions except the ones linked to vaccination and ‘stringencyVax’ only includes restrictions related to vaccination status.
More on the index
The methodology behind the index builds on the work from the Oxford University’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker but adds indicators that are more tailored to the Canadian response. 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.
Our past publications on the index:
- In the Canadian federation, pandemic response is hyper-local
- For reopening plans after COVID, who’s doing what and when?
- Have provinces put schools first during COVID?
To cite this data:
Breton, Charles, Ji Yoon Han, Mohy-Dean Tabbara and Paisley Sim. 2021. COVID-19 Canadian Provinces Measures Dataset. Center of Excellence on the Canadian Federation.
