Situating the Pandemic: Welfare Capitalism and Canada's Liberal Regime

This article focuses on Canada's liberal welfare state and the COVID-19 pandemic, offering an overview of some of the unequal health and social effects of the crisis. It argues that the policy response to the pandemic should be situated within a broader pattern of welfare restructuring and organization that serves to instrumentalize economic insecurity and extend labor discipline. Without making firm predictions about the future, we argue that this is likely to reproduce increasingly unequal patterns of welfare access, providing benefits to some constituents while disciplining vulnerable groups to facilitate competitive gains.