Interpreting crises through narratives: the construction of a COVID-19 policy narrative by Canada’s political parties

ABSTRACT

As an unprecedent global crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic required policy actors to make sense of the event while simultaneously constructing an effective policy response. In this article, we focus on the onset of the crisis in Canada and ask: how was a crisis narrative constructed and to what extent did the features of the emergent narrative vary across political elites? We bring together the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) with Foucault’s ‘biopolitics of population’ to explain the construction of an initial crisis narrative that is consistent with the economic rationale of neoliberal governmentalities. Using an original collection of 1,331 Hansard statements from Canadian Members of Parliament during the first wave (March to June 2020), we employ inductive content analysis to assess elements of narrative form. This article contributes to broader work seeking to understand how various actors construct narratives around the crisis and the consequences of such narrativization for policy responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative policy framework
• crisis narrative
• COVID-19
• Canada
• biopolitics

Acknowledgement

We thank the CPS editorial team and the two anonymous reviewers for their guidance and constructive engagement with the article. For feedback on previous versions of this article, we also thank Chris Alcantara, Shanaya Vanhooren, and participants at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. For his excellent research assistance, we thank Jacob Vangeest. Part of the research was funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Western Ontario.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Canada is a federal state that with a bicameral national legislature comprised of the House of Commons (lower chamber) and the Senate (upper chamber). Members of Parliament are elected to the House of Commons representing a political party, while Senators are appointed with no party affiliation. We limit our analysis to the House of Commons because it is the chamber in which nearly all legislation is introduced. Exploring the construction of narratives at the subnational level is beyond the scope of this paper but may present an interesting opportunity for future research.

2. The disaggregated totals are as follows: Liberal = 538, CPC = 406, NDP = 172, QB = 171, Green = 44.

3. The specific coding procedure was conservatively constructed, in that the coders were required to assign a ‘crisis’ label when the language used in the statement included (or strongly suggested) a ‘crisis,’ ‘unprecedented,’ ‘exceptional,’ etc., situation. In other words, we deliberately avoided assigning a crisis label for any statement that discussed the pandemic in any form.

4. The final coding scheme for the narrative characters is provided in the Supplementary Information.

5. As outlined in Campbell et al. (2013), conventional measures of inter-coder reliability may be problematic under certain conditions, namely the application of a large number of codes, complex coding tasks (where multiple codes can be applied to the same unit), and the use of content analysis in inductive or exploratory studies (especially when the purpose is not to generate data for a subsequent statistical analysis).

6. The average number of words used in the collected statements was approximately 212 (minimum = 11, maximum = 3236).

7. All data and files necessary to replicate the findings are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L64M72

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Political Science at Western University in Canada. She is Assistant Editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, as well as an Associate Editor of Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism. Her areas of study are situated at the intersections of Critical Political Theory, Continental Philosophy and Information/Media Studies.

Tyler Girard

Tyler Girard is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research focuses on the study of ideas, knowledge, and coalitional dynamics in international political economy and global politics. He is especially interested in the promotion of global norms and agendas and the intersection between coalitional politics, technological disruption, and financial regulation.

Anne Campbell

Anne Campbell recently graduated from Western University with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Political Science (Gold Medal). Currently, she is a part of the 2021-2022 cohort of the Parliamentary Internship Programme, which is run by the Canadian Political Science Association and the Canadian House of Commons. Starting in fall 2022, she will be pursuing a BCL/JD at McGill Law.