The political economy of COVID-19: Canadian and comparative perspectives — an introduction

Abstract

This paper introduces the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• political economy
• Studies in Political Economy (SPE)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We thank Nigel Carvalho and Jenna Ritch for their research assistance on this project. Together, we intervened early in the pandemic through a comparative public forum focusing on Canada and Germany that set us on our path for the arguments elaborated here. The forum was held on May 13, 2020 on the platform of the Canadian Urban Institute under the title Urban Society and Democracy During COVID-19: A Transatlantic Dialogue. Staged before the upheavals following the murder of George Floyd, and focusing on the urban scale in Berlin and Toronto, the panellists urged audiences in both countries to focus political attention on five related key insights: discussions of COVID-19 must centre race and class; the public realm is evolving; urban strategies vary substantially by city (and country); the internet unites us but is no substitute for public collective interaction, and progressive urban transformations are possible. See https://canurb.org/citytalk-news/cities-in-the-time-of-covid-19-urban-society-and-democracy-during-covid-19-a-translatlantic-dialogue/.

2 Gill and Benatar, Reflections on the Political Economy, 168.

3 Bailey et al., “The COVID-19 Pandemic”; Rogers et al., “The City Under Covid.”; Dodds et al., “The COVID-19 pandemic.”

4 Fanelli and Whiteside, “Covid-19, Capitalism and Contagion.”

5 Picard, Neglected No More.

6 Davis, “The Unraveling of America”; Kreisel, “The Unraveling of ‘The Unraveling’”; Yong, “How the Pandemic Defeated America.”

7 Ali and Keil, Networked Disease; Henry and Henry, Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe.

8 Bonnie Henry, the Provincial Health Officer of British Columbia, remembered after she had expressed concern about the virus’s potential spread from China to Canada in early 2020: “When I publicly expressed my informed belief that we’d likely see cases of this new coronavirus in B.C., I hit a nerve with the minister. But this gave me an opportunity to talk with him, and with our deputy minister of health, about why I was so sure and what else, realistically, I could see potentially happening here,” Be Kind, 41.

9 Horton, The COVID-19 Catastrophe, 17.

10 Saunders, “We Learn to Fight this Thing.”

11 MacMillan, “Making History,” 06.

12 Arthur, “Toronto Hospital Protests.”

13 Jones, “We Face a Public Health Emergency.”

14 Sassoon, Morbid Symptoms.

15 Greer et al., Coronavirus Politics.

16 See Bonfert, 2020; Bollyky and Fidler, 2020; Fidler, 2020; Glassman and Datema, 2020.

17 Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy; Sassoon, Morbid Symptoms.

18 Paris and Welsh, “The World’s Democracies.”

19 Price-Smith, Contagion and Chaos, 3; Greer et al., Coronavirus Politics; Ahlers et al., Democratic and Authoritarian Political Systems.

20 Davis, The Monster Enters; Horton The COVID-19 Catastrophe; Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal”; Žižek Pandemic!

21 Žižek, Pandemic, 68.

22 Davis, The Monster Enters, 17.

23 Sarasin, Anthrax; Sarasin, “Understanding the Coronavirus.”

24 Ren, “The Quarantine of a Megacity.”

25 Ren, “Pandemic and Lockdown.”

26 Ren, “Pandemic and Lockdown.”

27 Taylor, “Empty Streets”; Smith, “Life after the Coronavirus.”

28 Keil, “The Space and Time.”

29 Bhattacharya and Dale, “Covid Capitalism.”

30 Arruzza and Mometti, “Governance and Social Conflict.”

31 Schrappe et al, 2020.

32 Patterson, “Anatomy of a Pandemic,” 33.

33 Vialard et al., “Toward a Socio-territorial Approach to Health;” Biglieri, De Vidovich, and Keil “City as the Core of Contagion?”

34 Dodds et al., “The COVID-19 Pandemic.”

35 We are using the term “syndemic” in line with Richard Horton’s notion of the compounding effects of pandemic and existing morbidities that disproportionately affect the poor and the marginalized and underline the “vulnerability of older citizens; Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities; and key workers who are commonly poorly paid with fewer welfare protections.” Horton notes that this “points to a truth so far barely acknowledged—namely, that no matter how effective a treatment or protective a vaccine, the pursuit of a purely biomedical solution to COVID-19 will fail,” Horton, “Offline.”

36 Brand and Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living, 209–20.

37 Richardson, Epidemic Illusions; Ghosal, “’Are We Not Human?’”

38 Brandt and Windels, “Zur politischen Ökonomie der Corona-Krise.”

39 Pleyers “The Pandemic is a Battlefield,” 8.

40 Arruzza and Mometti, “Governance and Social Conflict.”

41 Clarke, “Organizing in the Face of Crisis,” 202.

42 Akbar, “Demands for a Democratic Political Economy.”

43 Angelo and Vormann, “Long Waves of Urban Reform.”

44 Davis, The Monster Enters, 44.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahmed Allahwala

Ahmed Allahwala teaches in the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto at Scarborough in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Roger Keil

Roger Keil teaches in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.