Emulate the Leader? Explaining Crisis Policy Change in the Canadian Federal System

In times of crises, do governments coordinate or do they make their own choices independent of what others do? Convergence of COVID‐19 policy at the beginning of the pandemic has been widely studied in federal countries. Yet, there is limited literature looking at the mechanisms that made policy between jurisdictions so similar. Utilizing Canada's decentralized federal system, this paper posits that convergence can be explained by a process of policy diffusion through emulation and a series of leader‐follower relationships. Drawing on the policy diffusion literature, this paper proposes three hypotheses for why some jurisdictions take on leadership roles in crisis policy while others follow. Synthesized as proximity, capacity, and urgency, these hypotheses are tested using a series of pairwise vector autoregressions identifying significant leader‐follower relationships between Canadian provinces. The findings suggest that policy primarily flowed from only a small number of large provinces (Quebec and Ontario), lending partial evidence, but also exceptions to the hypotheses proposed.