'How did we survive?' What Canadians recall — and don't — about the COVID-19 pandemic

There had been warning signs for months.

There were reports of dangerous flu-like symptoms in Asia. News of the lockdown that kept tens of millions of people inside their homes in China. Here at home, the growing ubiquity of blue surgical masks. The advice to sing "Happy Birthday" while washing your hands.

In March 2020, Ren Navarro recalled seeing large bottles of hand sanitizer at a beer event in Guelph, Ont., where she was a panellist. The Queen of Craft crowd was thinner than it should've been. It was being live-streamed for people at home.

"This was kind of like the unknowing precursor to what was going to happen," she said in a recent interview.

Days later, Navarro awoke to news of a sweeping shutdown meant to rein in the spread of the virus.

It was her 45th birthday. 

"I just remember, at some point, sitting on the sofa and crying," she said, even though she hadn't planned anything special to mark the occasion. Soon came the official stay-at-home order. Her world was suddenly contained to a two-bedroom apartment in Kitchener, Ont., with her wife, two cats, and no work.

The World Health Organization's declaration of a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, set into motion policies that would upend the lives of Canadians for years to come – from the closing of borders, to shutting down schools and businesses, to banning social gatherings.

“The early days of it was more of just like, how do I not lose my mind, and how do we stay safe from the thing that no one's really explained to us?" said Navarro.

As time went on, the realization that she was living through a crisis of historic proportions set in, Navarro said.

"Looking back on it, I'm like, how did we survive?"

Five years later, some Canadians are remembering the COVID-19 pandemic as a time of chaos, fear and grief, but also of solidarity and reflection — and raising concerns that the lessons learned from the crisis are already being forgotten.

While not as severe as those in countries such as China, South Korea or India, the public health measures enacted in Canada included unprecedented restrictions as well as fiscal stimulus and social protection efforts, said Sanjay Ruparelia, an associate professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University.

At first, the federal and provincial governments "were very much generally working together and, I think for the most part, citizens here followed those public health instructions," Ruparelia said, including staying at home.

Canadians showed a high level of social co-operation that reflected both cultural norms and a general trust that public authorities were doing the right thing, he said.

Not anymore.

The cohesion began to fray as the pandemic stretched on, partly due to disagreements over the balance of civil liberties and public safety, debates that were often fuelled by misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and the intentions of various institutions, he said. 

That discontent culminated in the protests that saw a convoy of truckers descend on downtown Ottawa in early 2022. A worsening cost-of-living crisis also began to undermine trust in governments during the pandemic and in the years that followed, Ruparelia added.

The long-term effects of lockdowns and school closures, particularly on children and teens, are still unknown, he said, but what's clear is that many of the changes that took place during that time seem to have faded from collective memory, giving rise to questions about Canada's response to any future crises that require public co-operation and trust in the scientific consensus.

"That's something that just upended our lives and had a huge impact on so many spheres of politics, society and our economies, (and) suddenly it's almost like a sense of amnesia — it didn't happen, or we've forgotten it happened," he said.

The virus spared no region, but its trajectory — and the steps taken to contain it — varied across provinces, territories and populations.

Quebec and Ontario, the two most populous provinces, were the hardest hit as the pandemic carved a deadly path through their vulnerable long-term care systems.

Atlantic Canada saw comparatively few infections, which experts attributed to geography and low population density, as well as the so-called Atlantic Bubble, which limited access to the region from the rest of Canada but allowed residents to travel freely within the four provinces' borders without isolating.

Meanwhile, Nunavut remained the only part of Canada without any confirmed cases for months before recording its first in Sanikiluaq in the fall of 2020.

For many, the early days of the pandemic were spent scrambling for information in the face of uncertainty as official reports and a steady stream of news updates charted the deadly toll of the virus.

Rapidly evolving rules and public-health advice sparked new routines and practices across the country, from sanitizing groceries and stockpiling toilet paper to banging pots and pans in a show of support for health-care staff and putting teddy bears in windows for children to see.

Images of empty grocery shelves, cordoned-off playgrounds and packed virtual meetings are displayed in a pandemic archive run by Ontario's Brock University, while diary-like submissions from residents in the Niagara Region pay tribute to lost loved ones and lay out anxieties about the long-term ramifications of closures.

Jocelyn Titone, a Brock employee who contributed to the archive, said even mundane details seemed worth preserving for future generations.

A video that was making the rounds at the time led Titone to adopt an elaborate food-cleaning system that included wiping down all groceries outside her home in St. Catharines, Ont., and rinsing produce with water and vinegar after washing, a memory that resurfaces to this day whenever she smells a particular cleaning product, she said.

“It sounds silly now. You're telling me I'm to tell my grandkids that these are things that we did," she said. 

"We sanitized our groceries and hung out with each other six feet apart, outside, in the freezing weather, just to see each other, or drove by somebody's house with signs to wish them a happy 50th birthday, because that was the only way we could really celebrate, other than just giving them a call.”

Those little rituals punctuated what often felt like overwhelming and unrelenting demands on her time and energy, said Titone, who suddenly found herself juggling full-time work in a new position and round-the-clock care for her two children, then three and five, during the lockdown. 

The stress was compounded by grief when her grandfather died in the U.S. in August 2020, and while his death wasn't due to COVID-19, pandemic rules meant she couldn't say goodbye in person or attend his funeral, she said.

“It was the worst mental health experience of my life,” she said. As restrictions loosened, Titone began spending more time outside, rekindled her love of reading and started keeping a gratitude journal on her phone, small steps that helped her recalibrate, she said. 

For Heather Breadner, the lockdown meant the abrupt closure of her yarn store in Lindsay, Ont. — and the birth of a new project she now considers her life's work.

As the death toll rose, Breadner and two friends set out to craft a blanket out of knitted squares to honour those whose lives were lost to the virus. At the time, some 4,000 people in Canada had died due to COVID-19, she said. The tally surpassed 50,000 in early 2023 and continues to increase, though at a slower rate.

The trio shared their plan on social media, thinking the project could provide a welcome distraction from the anxieties of the pandemic, she said.

More than a thousand knitters answered the call, something for which Breadner said she will forever be grateful.

So far, the group has assembled some 7,000 squares, working away at the blanket while watching movies in their spare time, she said. Another 5,000 or so still need to be added, with more potentially on the way, she said. 

"Particularly at the five-year anniversary mark, I feel it's so important because I feel like the further away we get from those early days, the further we get away from the fact that it's still happening," said Breadner, whose cousin is included in the memorial. 

"There are still people who are going into hospitals and not coming out, and there's still empty chairs at tables ... because there's still people dying from COVID," she said.

When the lockdown brought her advocacy and consulting work to a grinding halt, Navarro was forced to take a break for the first time in a while, she said.

The pause was bewildering at first, but eventually led her to take stock of her life and career, she said. She invested in a Zoom account and expanded her diversity work beyond the beer industry to include post-secondary and other sectors, a move that likely saved her business, she said.

For a while, pandemic restrictions forced people to slow down and break away from the hectic pace of modern life, while fear and isolation pushed them to reconnect with neighbours, friends and family members, Navarro said.

"But now we're back into the work capitalism, and we don't care about people," she said. "It's almost like the lockdown years didn't happen, and we didn't learn anything from it."