"We're all in this together?" The Pandemic, Intersectionality, Substantive Representation in Parliament

Early in the pandemic, messaging emphasized the virus' collective nature. According to this narrative, we’re all at risk, so “we’re all in this together.” Despite this discourse, data showed the uneven nature of the pandemic. In Canada, rates of COVID were higher among racialized minorities and Indigenous peoples. Frontline workers, including nurses and personal support staff who disproportionately women and often racialized, were more likely to contract and die from the virus. As elementary schools and childcare centres were locked down, women were most likely to vacate the workforce to fill this care gap. Researchers pointed to a growing “she-cession.” As vaccines were developed, Canada purchased large quantities for its own population, a situation that some argue exacerbated a global context of inequity. The pandemic generated uncertainty and upheaval, and policymakers were thrust into a decision-making context of unknowns. In this context of “uncrystallized interests,” representation is particularly important (Mansbridge 1999). This paper asks who represented what interests during the COVID pandemic. We look at Canada, a country that was initially hit hard by COVID with high death rates and vaccination rates that lagged behind those in the United States and many European countries. It is also a country with large racialized and Indigenous populations, including a number of racialized and Indigenous Members of Parliament. More than 30% of Members of Parliament are women, including several racialized and Indigenous women. Did these descriptive representatives substantively represent the interests of women, Indigenous peoples, and racialized Canadians during the pandemic? Or were those interests ignored or represented by other actors? Our paper uses discourse and content analysis, and we take advantage of a digitized archive of parliamentary speech known as Hansard, which provides a transcript of all interventions in Parliament. We analyze these interventions from January 2020 to December 2021, coding them for their content and the characteristics of each intervenor, including their gender, race, partisan affiliation, and parliamentary position. We look at which MPs were most likely to advocate for those groups most affected by the pandemic. Adopting an intersectional approach, we pay particular attention to the interventions of racialized and Indigenous women MPs to understand whether and how these identities informed their representational strategies in “unprecedented times.” The paper sheds new light on substantive representation, and contributes to a growing body of literature that looks not just at race or gender, but at both in combination.