Life in Quebec at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

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In late December 2019, reports of an unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, China began to trickle into global news channels. By January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) had already declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, warning that the novel coronavirus posed a “greatest threat” in China and that the world should prepare for spread^[1]. Two weeks later, on March 11, WHO formally labeled COVID-19 a global pandemic^[2]. These events set a stark backdrop: a virus of unknown lethality was moving unimpeded through modern travel corridors, and experts cautioned that “fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus”^[3]. In this climate of alarm, Québec’s authorities and citizens braced for impact, acutely aware that a dangerous cocktail of fear and misinformation could fan panic. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus even warned that the real “enemy” might be the stigma and hysteria—“the greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other,” he urged in early March^[4].

Emergence in Québec

The weeks that followed saw Québec move from preparedness to emergency operations. On March 12, Premier François Legault held his first provincial broadcast press conference. Standing at the lectern in Québec City, he announced that the province was “entering emergency mode” and urged calm. He stressed basic hygiene—frequent hand-washing, coughing into elbows—and warned residents to protect the elderly and avoid visits to seniors’ homes unless absolutely necessary^[6]. (Unspoken was a lingering memory: many Quebec health officials had lived through the 2003 SARS crisis in Canada, when hospital outbreaks and quarantines had terrified Toronto. Still, Québec’s experience with SARS was limited, and this time the threat loomed larger.)

Two days later, on March 14, Legault addressed the crisis further. He announced the first health emergency decree in Québec’s history, effective March 13, 2020. All non-essential activities would pause. By March 15 the measures had teeth: any indoor or outdoor “cultural, educational, sports, recreation or entertainment” activities were suspended, and bars and restaurants were ordered to close their dining rooms^[7]. Schools and daycare centers shuttered (except for children of essential workers), and only take-out or delivery food service remained. Grocers and pharmacies were allowed to extend hours to meet demand, even staying open until 11:00 PM and opening on Sundays as needed^[8]. In short order, Québec looked unlike itself: senior citizens lined up in suburban pharmacies, college students moved home from dorms, and the 4×4 SUVs idled at closed border checkpoints as the province even restricted inter-regional travel^[9].

Citizens were asked to limit all but essential journeys. Even a day before the March 13 emergency decree, authorities began cancelling flights and VIA Rail trains and advising residents to avoid non-essential travel^[10]. By March 29 police checkpoints appeared at internal borders: “All Québecers were asked to avoid travelling from one region to another… except when necessary,” reported the government, as eight regions effectively went under lockdown^[9]. As a result, Montreal’s normally bustling downtown went eerily quiet; parks closed, churches locked their doors, and visits to grand-parents had to be cancelled or moved online. Quebec’s health director, Dr. Horacio Arruda, appeared nightly alongside Legault, pleading with citizens to “stay home” and “save lives,” imbuing a routine intensity into Québec’s collective routine.

Life Under Lockdown

Daily life abruptly changed. Commuter highways cleared as offices and factories told workers to telecommute. Public transit ridership collapsed, replaced by a few masked faces walking dogs or fetching groceries. In late March, Legault declared that supermarkets, grocery chains, and drugstores could remain open long hours so people could shop safely^[8], but urged everyone to do one’s shopping quickly and with minimal contact. Retail stores and salons fell silent. Even mundane rules were altered: stores were asked to close on Sundays to allow staff respite, except pharmacies and essential food retailers^[11]. When spring breaker trips were cancelled, Québecers took walks in empty city streets or sought solace in their backyards. Children who would normally be at school were at home with parents scrambling to balance remote work and impromptu homeschooling.

Throughout April 2020, the province’s day-to-day was dominated by Legault’s coronavirus briefings. His gravelly assurances—”I love you, #Québec” became an oft-repeated sign-off on Twitter—punctuated the rhythm of confinement. Order of importance was blunt: stay at home, wash hands often, and avoid crowds. Québecers complied on a broad front, at least initially. Premier Legault himself crowed on July 19 that “the vast majority of Quebecers respected the instructions” regarding masks and distancing^[12]. And indeed, for months Québec’s curve flattened modestly, especially compared to some other regions. In May, as daily cases briefly declined, Québecers felt some relief. Parks reopened with restrictions, and small family gatherings were permitted in June. Still, the fear of a “second wave” in the fall lingered, driving a cautious citizenry to at least accept most rules.

Despite the risk, there was much compliance. By summer 2020, one visible change: face coverings in public. At first, health authorities did not urge healthy people to mask. In fact, in early April the government discouraged general use of masks to conserve supplies for the ill and medical staff^[13]. But by mid-2020 public messaging shifted. A Quebec government infographic by June showed how to sew and wear cloth masks, and non-medical masks became “strongly recommended” for everyone^[13]. On July 13 masks were made mandatory on public transit and by July 18 in all indoor public spaces^[14]. In effect, by mid-summer walking into a supermarket without a face covering became as unusual as shielding one’s eyes on a sunny day. The transformation was jarring: a summer in Québécois streets where people routinely exchanged air through masks.

The Mask Conundrum

Yet masks brought their own controversies. Québec’s limited stock of medical-grade masks became a headline in its own right. On March 30, 2020, Legault bluntly announced that Quebec’s supply of “critical” equipment would last only about a week^[15]. Hospitals were burning through masks at ten times normal rates, and N95 respirators in particular “cannot be reused,” meaning shortages were terrifying for front-line staff^[16]. Public-health and union reports documented nurses reusing or going without proper masks. (One Montreal nurse later told a local magazine that in long-term care homes staff “weren’t allowed masks at the beginning because we weren’t trusted to use them judiciously,” and managers had even removed PPE from homes to feed hospital supply lines^[17].) The sight of a masked child in a grocery line was partly a practical response to that shortage: a homemade bandana or cloth mask posed better than nothing. Consumers hoarded N95 and surgical masks despite advice they were meant for caregivers, and small entrepreneurs in Montréal began sterilizing and selling reused respirators to meet demand. The scarcity fueled anxiety—the image of a doctor futilely waving a flimsy paper mask on TV etched many Québecers with the sense that something dire was afoot.

Even as cloth masks became normalized, a silent debate raged. Some Quebecers loudly insisted on masks as freedom—others decried them as coercion. Cardboard signs sprouted reading “We had no freedom, now we have no oxygen.” Business owners faced the quandary of customer and fine: establishments were legally responsible for enforcing the mask rule, but many shopkeepers quietly sympathized with skeptical patrons. Opposition simmered more openly with the arrival of special rules: by late fall a curfew had been imposed (reluctantly) on December 25, 2020, and the debate over masks and vaccination soon magnified political divisions.

Compliance and Defiance

Despite overall acquiescence, pockets of rebellion emerged. In the summer of 2020, small anti-mask and “anti-restriction” gatherings were reported across Québec. Videos circulated of someone heckling a pharmacist (“Show me the science!”), or a masked mother being asked to step outside a pharmacy, sometimes ending with police being called. On July 18, as the indoor-mask rule took effect, a rally formed outside the Premier’s Montréal office: about two dozen protesters waving signs like “Resistance à vie” declared the mandate tyranny. By December 2020, public frustration had built over renewed restrictions. On Dec. 20, hundreds of demonstrators convened again at Legault’s office, refusing masks and police directives. The next day Montréal police announced they issued 269 fines of $1,546 each to protesters who defied mask orders^[18]. One visibly angry protester on video ranted that the measures were “excessive”, and claimed he’d rather stay home. Such scenes were exceptional, however. Polling and academic studies indicated most Québecers did not buy into fringe conspiracies. For example, a recent social-research project found that belief in pandemic “fake news” remained quite low—only about 7% of French-speaking Quebecers found common Covid conspiracy theories plausible—and in fact fewer people believed the wild theories by late 2020 than early 2019^[19]. In short, while a noisy minority flouted the rules, the silent majority by and large acquiesced to (or at least tolerated) the precautions.

Indeed, surveys suggested that exposure to social-media falsehoods did not automatically translate into belief. UQAM professor Tania Gosselin noted that during COVID-19 “exposure is not equal to contamination”^[20]: in other words, seeing conspiratorial posts did not mean audiences wholeheartedly bought them. If anything, the pandemic brought conspiracies more into mainstream consciousness, which paradoxically delegitimized them. Participants in her study reported that the conspiratorial narratives had become less credible in 2021 than before the crisis, likely because media scrutiny had debunked many claims^[19]. Quebec’s tradition of trust in science and media may have helped inoculate the public. In mid-2020 polls found Quebecers still overwhelmingly believed in basic public health facts about COVID and the coming vaccines, even if they questioned the government on hospital preparedness. Most Québécois, in private conversations, chalked up angry protesters to marginal figures: Ontario rock bands touring without masks, or “freedom convoy” types they saw on social media, seemed far away from their own lives.

Fact, Folklore, and Fear

The early COVID era was also riddled with wild rumors and half-truths. Like elsewhere, Québec saw its share of urban legends: reminders to gargle salt water, claims that drinking colloidal silver or taking vitamin D pills could kill the virus, or the notion that Chinese restaurants were safe (or dangerous) food. None of those ideas had any basis, but they flourished briefly on message boards. Public health websites and mainstream media tackled them head-on; the provincial government posted “myth-busting” FAQs at its COVID-19 site and in multiple languages^[13]. Meanwhile, Quebec’s sizable immigrant communities tracked the global narratives: some Asian Canadians reported hate incidents, prompting human-rights groups to warn against any racial scapegoating (echoing Tedros’s plea that solidarity, not stigma, must prevail^[4]). Others watched debates overseas—lab-origin theories, 5G radiation conspiracies, Bill Gates microchip fantasies—and shook their heads. By contrast to the U.S., political allegiance mattered little in Québec’s pandemic beliefs: research indicated that whether one leaned left or right had only a minor influence on whether one endorsed COVID conspiracies^[21]. Instead, “méfiance envers les autorités” (distrust of politicians) was a bigger factor. That may explain why some fed-up citizens prefaced any new restriction with a sigh—a reflection that in Québec’s hostile media landscape, the pandemic was quickly swept into debates about federal-provincial power and the future of Quebec’s welfare state.

What about N95 masks specifically? For most citizens, the details of respirator filtering standards weren’t front-page news. They knew N95s existed, and they saw hospitals eagerly clamor for them. Early on, authorities assured the public that homemade or surgical masks would suffice. But nursing unions and frontline workers in Québec’s long-term care homes were furious to learn that they were told to do without N95s even when caring for COVID patients. Amid a tragic spring surge of deaths in nursing homes, one nurse tweeted in April that staff had been reusing single-use N95s for weeks because “there is clearly not enough”^[15][17]. That anger fed onto social media in Québec: any time health officials said masks were not needed outside hospitals, skeptics remembered just how badly underprotected so many caregivers had been. In short, N95s became both symbol and scapegoat: a symbol of frontline desperation, and a scapegoat for those convinced the government had mishandled the crisis.

For the Time Being, All Eyes On Science

Amid all the turmoil, one thing remained constant: official messaging kept returning to science and community responsibility. Premier Legault insisted (sometimes in his trademark blunt style) that Quebecers must rely on experts and logic, not fear. On social media he retweeted over and over: wash hands, keep distance, get tested if sick. Even die-hard libertarians in Quebec heard this message: in late March he paused election campaigning and called the public to solidarity, reminding everyone that “we’re all in this together—let’s do it for our grandparents.” University professors and doctors also appealed to shared heritage of past hardship: the Quiet Revolution-era generation recalled polio vaccines and community mobilization against polio, not against masks. Even the hardcore anti-maskers were a cross-section of society—some believed COVID was a “plandemic” on YouTube, some just doubted institutions.

By the close of 2020, fear in Québec had partially abated. Case numbers had fallen in summer, and anxieties over hospital collapse had eased (long-term-care homes, not hospitals, had borne the worst initial impact). Towns opened patios and beaches; by autumn the tone shifted to muted optimism about vaccine development. Still, the anxieties of early spring left marks. Each morning in Montréal or Québec City now often began with a sight of masks in store windows or a sanitizer station at a café entrance. The political landscape had also shifted: public health was now a polarized issue in a way seldom seen in Québec before, with a few vocal partisans refusing any limits. But the old one-party consensus had cracked; yet polls showed that even then, a large majority of francophone Quebecers backed restrictions as “necessary” rather than oppressive.

What began as fearful whispers in January quickly became the defining crisis of the era. Québec’s initial response—orderly shutdowns, a collective embrace of hygiene, occasional bouts of uneasy protest—captured how this society processed the unknown threat. In those first months, it learned, often the hard way, that fear alone was an unreliable guide. The truly dangerous forces proved not to be invisible viruses or online rumors, but complacency and division. As Québec moved into 2021, the lessons of early 2020 held firm: trust the experts, beware the gossip, and remember that solidarity was both the cure we needed and the one we could give.

Also, don’t forget to check out “Missing Since January” Behind The Screenplay page for more information on the writing inspiration and process.

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