How did we survive?’ What Canadians recall — and don’t — about the COVID-19 pandemic

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Paola Loriggio, March 11, 2025

There had been warning signs for months.

There were reports of dangerous flu-like symptoms in Asia. News of the lockdown that kept tens of millions of people inside their homes in China. Here at home, the growing ubiquity of blue surgical masks. The advice to sing “Happy Birthday” while washing your hands.

In March 2020, Ren Navarro recalled seeing large bottles of hand sanitizer at a beer event in Guelph, Ont., where she was a panellist. The Queen of Craft crowd was thinner than it should’ve been. It was being live-streamed for people at home.

“This was kind of like the unknowing precursor to what was going to happen,” she said in a recent interview.

Days later, Navarro awoke to news of a sweeping shutdown meant to rein in the spread of the virus.

It was her 45th birthday. 

“I just remember, at some point, sitting on the sofa and crying,” she said, even though she hadn’t planned anything special to mark the occasion. Soon came the official stay-at-home order. Her world was suddenly contained to a two-bedroom apartment in Kitchener, Ont., with her wife, two cats, and no work.

The World Health Organization’s declaration of a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, set into motion policies that would upend the lives of Canadians for years to come – from the closing of borders, to shutting down schools and businesses, to banning social gatherings.

“The early days of it was more of just like, how do I not lose my mind, and how do we stay safe from the thing that no one’s really explained to us?” said Navarro.

As time went on, the realization that she was living through a crisis of historic proportions set in, Navarro said.

“Looking back on it, I’m like, how did we survive?”

Five years later, some Canadians are remembering the COVID-19 pandemic as a time of chaos, fear and grief, but also of solidarity and reflection — and raising concerns that the lessons learned from the crisis are already being forgotten.

While not as severe as those in countries such as China, South Korea or India, the public health measures enacted in Canada included unprecedented restrictions as well as fiscal stimulus and social protection efforts, said Sanjay Ruparelia, an associate professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University.

At first, the federal and provincial governments “were very much generally working together and, I think for the most part, citizens here followed those public health instructions,” Ruparelia said, including staying at home.

Canadians showed a high level of social co-operation that reflected both cultural norms and a general trust that public authorities were doing the right thing, he said.

Not anymore.

The cohesion began to fray as the pandemic stretched on, partly due to disagreements over the balance of civil liberties and public safety, debates that were often fuelled by misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and the intentions of various institutions, he said. 

That discontent culminated in the protests that saw a convoy of truckers descend on downtown Ottawa in early 2022. A worsening cost-of-living crisis also began to undermine trust in governments during the pandemic and in the years that followed, Ruparelia added.

The long-term effects of lockdowns and school closures, particularly on children and teens, are still unknown, he said, but what’s clear is that many of the changes that took place during that time seem to have faded from collective memory, giving rise to questions about Canada’s response to any future crises that require public co-operation and trust in the scientific consensus.

“That’s something that just upended our lives and had a huge impact on so many spheres of politics, society and our economies, (and) suddenly it’s almost like a sense of amnesia — it didn’t happen, or we’ve forgotten it happened,” he said.

The virus spared no region, but its trajectory — and the steps taken to contain it — varied across provinces, territories and populations.

Quebec and Ontario, the two most populous provinces, were the hardest hit as the pandemic carved a deadly path through their vulnerable long-term care systems.

Atlantic Canada saw comparatively few infections, which experts attributed to geography and low population density, as well as the so-called Atlantic Bubble, which limited access to the region from the rest of Canada but allowed residents to travel freely within the four provinces’ borders without isolating.

Meanwhile, Nunavut remained the only part of Canada without any confirmed cases for months before recording its first in Sanikiluaq in the fall of 2020.

For many, the early days of the pandemic were spent scrambling for information in the face of uncertainty as official reports and a steady stream of news updates charted the deadly toll of the virus.

Rapidly evolving rules and public-health advice sparked new routines and practices across the country, from sanitizing groceries and stockpiling toilet paper to banging pots and pans in a show of support for health-care staff and putting teddy bears in windows for children to see.

Images of empty grocery shelves, cordoned-off playgrounds and packed virtual meetings are displayed in a pandemic archive run by Ontario’s Brock University, while diary-like submissions from residents in the Niagara Region pay tribute to lost loved ones and lay out anxieties about the long-term ramifications of closures.

Jocelyn Titone, a Brock employee who contributed to the archive, said even mundane details seemed worth preserving for future generations.

A video that was making the rounds at the time led Titone to adopt an elaborate food-cleaning system that included wiping down all groceries outside her home in St. Catharines, Ont., and rinsing produce with water and vinegar after washing, a memory that resurfaces to this day whenever she smells a particular cleaning product, she said.

“It sounds silly now. You’re telling me I’m to tell my grandkids that these are things that we did,” she said. 

“We sanitized our groceries and hung out with each other six feet apart, outside, in the freezing weather, just to see each other, or drove by somebody’s house with signs to wish them a happy 50th birthday, because that was the only way we could really celebrate, other than just giving them a call.”

Those little rituals punctuated what often felt like overwhelming and unrelenting demands on her time and energy, said Titone, who suddenly found herself juggling full-time work in a new position and round-the-clock care for her two children, then three and five, during the lockdown. 

The stress was compounded by grief when her grandfather died in the U.S. in August 2020, and while his death wasn’t due to COVID-19, pandemic rules meant she couldn’t say goodbye in person or attend his funeral, she said.

“It was the worst mental health experience of my life,” she said. As restrictions loosened, Titone began spending more time outside, rekindled her love of reading and started keeping a gratitude journal on her phone, small steps that helped her recalibrate, she said. 

For Heather Breadner, the lockdown meant the abrupt closure of her yarn store in Lindsay, Ont. — and the birth of a new project she now considers her life’s work.

As the death toll rose, Breadner and two friends set out to craft a blanket out of knitted squares to honour those whose lives were lost to the virus. At the time, some 4,000 people in Canada had died due to COVID-19, she said. The tally surpassed 50,000 in early 2023 and continues to increase, though at a slower rate.

The trio shared their plan on social media, thinking the project could provide a welcome distraction from the anxieties of the pandemic, she said.

More than a thousand knitters answered the call, something for which Breadner said she will forever be grateful.

So far, the group has assembled some 7,000 squares, working away at the blanket while watching movies in their spare time, she said. Another 5,000 or so still need to be added, with more potentially on the way, she said. 

“Particularly at the five-year anniversary mark, I feel it’s so important because I feel like the further away we get from those early days, the further we get away from the fact that it’s still happening,” said Breadner, whose cousin is included in the memorial. 

“There are still people who are going into hospitals and not coming out, and there’s still empty chairs at tables … because there’s still people dying from COVID,” she said.

When the lockdown brought her advocacy and consulting work to a grinding halt, Navarro was forced to take a break for the first time in a while, she said.

The pause was bewildering at first, but eventually led her to take stock of her life and career, she said. She invested in a Zoom account and expanded her diversity work beyond the beer industry to include post-secondary and other sectors, a move that likely saved her business, she said.

For a while, pandemic restrictions forced people to slow down and break away from the hectic pace of modern life, while fear and isolation pushed them to reconnect with neighbours, friends and family members, Navarro said.

“But now we’re back into the work capitalism, and we don’t care about people,” she said. “It’s almost like the lockdown years didn’t happen, and we didn’t learn anything from it.”

 2)’The fire is still lit’: How COVID-19 and its aftermath sparked a new era for labour

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Rosa Saba, March 8, 2025

When COVID-19 hit, millions of Canadians were either told to work remotely or temporarily laid off as governments ordered lockdowns to protect public health.

Not Arlick Leslie.

While others were setting up a home office or applying for income assistance, he continued to work at a Walmart warehouse in Mississauga, Ont. The non-compliance clerk was one of many workers deemed “essential,” heralded by politicians for their service at a time when even shopping for groceries felt like a risk.

“We had to be out there … facing the elements,” said Leslie.

Many workers, including Leslie, didn’t feel like their treatment matched the important role they were playing. Losing an hourly “hero pay” bump after just a couple of months added to a growing pile of frustrations over wages and scheduling for Leslie and his co-workers.

As time went on, Leslie and his co-workers saw unionized workers at places like Ontario’s liquor wholesaler fighting — and winning gains — at the bargaining table, earning back some of what they felt they had lost since 2020. 

“We’ve seen the (unionized) workers speaking up for what they think they deserve,” Leslie said. 

“So we’re like, ‘you know what? Why not give this a shot?'”

Workers at the warehouse unionized through Unifor last September, and are now negotiating the terms of their first collective agreement. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent runaway inflation that eroded workers’ purchasing power, spurred what experts call a rise in union militancy, where workers drew harder-than-ever lines with employers on issues like wages and working conditions. The result: many workers won significant wage gains and some unionized at notoriously hard-to-organize companies, buoyed by elevated levels of public support.

“We’ve seen it with postal workers, we’ve seen it with dock workers, we’ve seen it with retail workers, we’ve seen it with production workers,” said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.

“It’s a pretty universal phenomenon that workers are recognizing their worth and are willing to push for more, and they’re willing to walk the picket line to get more.”

Health, safety and hero status

The so-called hero pay was emblematic of workers in areas like transportation, health care, long-term care and retail becoming “the ones that we relied upon the most,” said Bruske. 

But in some sectors, the hero pay was short-lived. For example, Canada’s three major grocers removed their hourly bonuses in June 2020 (Empire reinstated some bonuses for workers in locked-down areas that December). 

“While we appreciated them in the short term, it was almost performative,” said Bruske. 

In the early months of the pandemic, amid constantly shifting public health measures and supply chain disruptions, many unionized employers looked to defer bargaining, said Lesley Prince, director of organizing at United Food and Commercial Workers Canada, especially in sectors massively affected by closures like hospitality.

“There was so much uncertainty that most companies just wanted to sort of maintain the status quo, because they didn’t know when things were going to reopen and start operating on a full-time basis again,” said Prince. 

As the months wore on, companies were dealing with supply chain disruptions stemming from COVID-19 as well as geopolitical tensions and extreme weather, said Pascal Chan, vice-president of strategic policy and supply chains for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce: “There have been no shortage of disruptions.” 

Justin Gniposky, who was a national representative in Unifor’s organizing department when the pandemic hit, believes some companies took advantage of the circumstances and sought concessionary deals.

Uncertainty and mass unemployment muted workers’ resistance in 2020 and 2021, said Stephanie Ross, an associate professor at McMaster University’s labour studies school. 

But unions had more leverage as inflation spiked, labour tightened and profits stabilized in some sectors

“I think that the pandemic brought to the forefront a new set of issues for the labour movement to confront in workplaces and in public policy, and I think that it also … created the conditions that brought forth a wave of militancy that we haven’t seen in several decades,” said Ross.

“You can’t eat hero status.” 

In response to concerns raised by the unionizing workers at Walmart, spokesperson Stephanie Fusco emphasized pay premiums and bonuses the company enacted in 2020, as well as more recent wage increases. (Unionized workers didn’t get the latest round of raises; the company says their wages will be decided through negotiations. Unifor has alleged the raise is an anti-union tactic, which Walmart denies.) 

“We take health and safety concerns seriously and work to promptly address them,” Fusco said in a statement. 

Bargaining for deals

Unions tried to channel workers’ frustration into negotiations, said Gniposky, now Unifor’s director of organizing. 

In 2022 and 2023 Unifor led a series of “aggressive” bargaining rounds, Gniposky said, such as with the Detroit Three automakers. Workers at Stellantis, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors got double-digit wage gains and improvements to various benefits after a short-lived strike. The deals followed pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions amid major pushes to invest in the electric vehicle transition. 

Metro grocery workers in the Toronto area made headlines during a month-long strike in 2023, eventually reaching a deal that essentially brought back their lost pandemic pay. 

Public-sector workers also took to the streets, including tens of thousands of federal government employees in 2023. 

“There was a moment from late 2022 onward, where unions had more relative power to make those gains, to go on strike, and more public support than we had seen for many, many years for those kinds of disruptions,” said Ross, the McMaster labour specialist.

But workers still faced pushback from their employers and, in some cases, governments. Last year the federal government intervened in several high-profile private-sector labour disputes.

Business groups say major labour disruptions, like the month-long strike by Canada Post last year, as well as recent stoppages at ports and railways, cost the economy billions of dollars, disrupt the flow of important commodities and jeopardize the livelihoods of small business owners. 

In some cases, industry called on the government to step in.

Recent high-profile work stoppages have not only hurt employers and the economy but also Canada’s reputation as a trading partner, said Chan, with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

“These are getting a lot of attention internationally,” he said. 

Some on the industry side, like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business’ Dan Kelly, believe the government has tipped the scales too far toward unionized workers in recent years through legislative changes. 

This, plus a tight labour market coming out of the pandemic, empowered workers — including non-unionized employees — to ask for “higher than normal” pay increases, Kelly said. 

Breakthroughs in organizing

One group of workers in particular made headlines across North America for unionizing: employees at large chains, including multinational companies such as Starbucks, Walmart and Amazon.

Unifor began organizing at B.C. Amazon warehouses in 2023, and has filed to unionize one of them. The union is currently embroiled in a complaint against Amazon, alleging it tried to dilute and tamp down union support, which the retailer denies. 

UFCW, meanwhile, saw success at chains like Indigo and PetSmart.

But Ross, with McMaster, said unions have had a hard time truly moving the needle at these corporate giants.

The first unionized Amazon warehouse in Canada was in Quebec. After it lost a bid to challenge the certification, Amazon announced earlier this year it would close all of its Quebec warehouses, a decision the Confédération des syndicats nationaux is seeking to overturn. 

Digital updates

In addition to galvanizing workers, the pandemic also spurred long-overdue technological changes that make it easier to unionize, said Gniposky. For example, digital union cards are now widespread, meaning workers can sign cards from anywhere. Votes are also usually electronic, resulting in a higher turnout.

Ross said the pressures of the past few years have “created a different mood in the labour movement than we’ve seen for a long time.”

“But … the question of whether or not the lessons from this last five years are going to be learned in ways that enhance the power of the labour movement to make economic and political gains for workers is, I think, still an open question,” she said. 

The next four years of the Donald Trump presidency could prove to be another opportunity, Gniposky said, as challenging times can build solidarity. 

“The fire is still lit,” he said.

“This is an opportunity and we’ve got to take advantage of it.”