Come find your island: The ‘Atlantic Bubble’ as Atlantic Canada’s ‘covid-archipelago’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

At the subnational level and independent of the national government, the four Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick created the ’Atlantic Bubble’ from July 3, 2020, to November 23, 2020, approximately 40% of the 2020 calendar year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the phenomenon of jurisdictions coupling into ‘travel/quarantine bubbles’ with imposed hard borders occurred, but primarily at the state-state level such as the ’Trans-Tasman Bubble’ involving New Zealand and Australia (Government of New Zealand, 2021), and the ’Baltic Bubble’ of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (BBC News, 2020).

This doctoral project employs the descriptive and explanatory powers of two policy process theories, 1) multiple streams framework (Kingdon 1984, 1995) and 2) the concept of policy learning (Deutsch,1966; Heclo, 1974; May, 1993; Hall, 1988, 1993) in seeking to understand what became known at the 'Atlantic Bubble'. Further, the conceptualizations of covid as complex intergovernmental problem (Paquet and Schertzer, 2020) and crisis governance are employed to situate this intergovernmental policy cooperation in its’ social context. This project also engaged in theory-building to propose new conceptual island constructs of 'covid-islands’ & ‘covid-archipelagos' as frames of inquiry (Halliday, 2025).

Data was generated through semi-structured interviews with key policy actors, as well as via publicly available grey literature and primary source media coverage. The analysis finds that the Atlantic Bubble was a socio-spatial island imaginary policy construct amongst the four Atlantic Canadian subnational provincial governments. The ideation and efforts to place it on the regional, intergovernmental policy agenda were led by PEI Premier King as a policy entrepreneur, and represented a uniform, yet nuanced, collaborative implementation, grounded in policy learning. These efforts were supported by the utilization of the Council of Atlantic Premiers – a permanent, regional intergovernmental institution as a policy venue.

This project contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of policy responses to the COVID pandemic from a Canadian subnational and regional perspective, while investigating policy change across respective subnational jurisdictions. It informs our theoretical understanding of islandness and policy change by introducing a focus on new imagined island and archipelagic constructs hitherto lacking.