Economic Hardships in Pandemic Times: A Look at Canadian and Foreign-Born Led Households in Sanitary Environments


Fernando Mata, University of Ottawa

Using information from selected public health interventions and a sample of approximately 38,000 respondents to the Canadian Household survey, this study examined the economic hardships experienced by Canadian and foreign-born led households residing in various sanitary environments during the first half of 2021. Pandemics such as COVID-19 in Canada had a wide range of health, social and economic consequences related to both the spread of the disease and the efforts made by public health agencies attempting to contain it. To mitigate the impact of the virus, during 2020 and 2022, Canadian public health agencies intervened in domains of social life such as the travel and movement of individuals, boundaries of physical contact, vaccinations, surveillance of symptoms and the expansion of local powers via declarations of states of emergency (Zheng at al., 2020, Hsiao‑Hui et al., 2020). As a direct consequence of these health interventions various COVID-19 sanitary environments were created and enforced. These environments are said to have provided a broad "non-pharmaceutical" context where social interactions were strictly regulated (Douglas et al., 2020, Ferguson et.al, 2020; Deschamps, 2020; Hardy and Logan, 2020, Pezenik, 2020; Shaefer et al., 2020). Four typical sanitary environments created and enforced by provincial and territorial governments during the pandemic period were identified. These environments, which differed in terms of their focal areas of work, were respectively named: SE1: Travel Restrictions and Lockdowns, SE2: Aboriginal and Municipal Welfare, SE3: Crowd Size and Pandemic Information, and SE4: Regional Welfare and Vaccinations The first ones, SE1 type of environments were more predominant in the Prairie provinces and British Columbia, SE2 in the Territories and Atlantic provinces, SE3 in Ontario, and SE4 in Quebec and Newfoundland. The study found that regardless of residence in a particular sanitary environment, visible minority immigrant-led households were among those that experienced the highest level of economic hardships. Multivariate data analysis also found that the effect of immigrant status was mostly attributable to the visible minority status of many immigrants and that of residence in particular sanitary environments disappeared in the presence of other household-related covariates such as income levels, general health and/or renter status of the household lead. Although the economic hardships experienced by Canadians may not be directly attributed to public health interventions, from a psycho-social viewpoint, the rapid pace of interventions may have produced unintended consequences such as creating more anxieties about collective wellbeing and the economic survival of the population at large. Pinpointing the specific associations between public health environments and well-being outcomes in the Canadian population during the pandemic, however, requires the help of more specialized surveys addressing these specific issues.

This paper will be presented at the following session: