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

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.