Social policy responses to COVID-19 in Canada and the United States: Explaining policy variations between two liberal welfare state regimes

Canada and the United States are often grouped together as liberal welfare-state regimes, with broadly similar levels of social spending. Yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic reveals, the two countries engage in highly divergent approaches to social policymaking during a massive public health emergency. Drawing on evidence from the first 5 months of the pandemic, this article compares social policy measures taken by the United States and Canadian governments in response to COVID-19. In general, we show that Canadian responses were both more rapid and comprehensive than those of the United States. This variation, we argue, can be explained by analysing the divergent political institutions, pre-existing policy legacies, and variations in cross-partisan consensus, which have all shaped national decision-making in the middle of the crisis.