Concerns and precautions taken in the Canadian North during the pandemicSTATCAN COVID-19: Data to Insights for a Better Canada, 6 July 2020
"The COVID-19 pandemic is having a considerable impact on the economic and social well-being of Canadians, even in regions that have not been impacted by the pandemic to the same extent as other regions. In Yukon and the Northwest Territories, only a handful of cases were recorded in the early stages of the pandemic, and as of late June, Nunavut had not recorded a single case of COVID-19. Nevertheless, these territories introduced COVID-19-related restrictions that were very similar to measures introduced in all Canadians provinces.1
From April 3 to April 25, 2020—a period when many new cases of COVID-19 were reported in several provinces— Statistics Canada used crowdsourcing to collect information about Canadians’ concerns and the precautions they were taking during the pandemic. Nearly 250,000 participants completed the questionnaire during these three weeks of data collection. Of these, 1,849 indicated that they resided in Yukon, 513 reported that they were in the Northwest Territories, and 121 stated that they were in Nunavut. Of the participants in Yukon and the Northwest Territories, the vast majority (at least 8 in 10) lived in the census agglomerations of Whitehorse and Yellowknife. In Nunavut, most participants reported that they were living in Iqaluit. Throughout this report, differences between territorial capitals and other areas will be highlighted where applicable, except for Nunavut, which did not have enough participants for these differences to be examined.
Crowdsourcing is not a probabilistic survey, and data collected via crowdsourcing cannot be used to generate conclusions about the overall population living in the territories. However, crowdsourcing data represent a unique opportunity to give a sense of how people in the Canadian North reacted as the pandemic unfolded. This report provides information on the concerns of and precautions taken by Canadians living in the North during the peak of the pandemic."