The COVID-19 pandemic challenged older adults’ health behaviours, making it even more difficult to engage in healthy diets and physical activity than it had been prepandemic. A resource to promote these could be social support. This study uses data from 136 older adults (Mage = 71.39 years, SD = 5.15, range: 63–87) who reported their daily fruit and vegetable consumption, steps, and health-behaviour-specific support from a close other every evening for up to 10 consecutive days. Findings show that on days when participants reported more emotional support than usual, fruit and vegetable consumption and step counts were higher. Daily instrumental support was positively associated with step counts, only. Participants receiving more overall emotional support across the study period consumed more fruit and vegetables; no parallel person-level association was found for overall steps. There were no significant interactions between dyad type and support links for our outcomes.

This article reflects on the global uprisings in support of Black life during the early pandemic. The focus is on what the protests reveal about Black resistance to the nation-building project of Canada. Protests during this period are understood here to have included taking to the streets, practicing care, and calling for abolition. Drawing on critical race theory and Black Studies, especially Black feminism, the author claims these forms of protest condemned Black dispossession under Canadian laws, while they simultaneously exceeded Canada’s jurisdiction. In other words, the protests can be understood ambivalently, as occurring under and responding to, but not being of, domination. They refashioned the self and the collective, expressing transient freedom from domination and partial redress, even as settler colonial laws would continue to suppress Black and other subaltern peoples. The article navigates such insights through works by Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Katherine McKittrick, among others.

Paradigms of governance are defined in part by paradigms of contestation—stockpiles of culturally legible tactics for contesting power. This article analyzes the growing use of hard-block and mutual aid tactics in Metulia (sometimes called Victoria, B.C.) as exemplars that suggest liberal paradigms of contestation may be becoming less rigid. Drawing on Robert Cover and Charles Tilly, I argue that the present conjuncture is not, as many analyses suggest, merely a tipping point between one paradigm and the next. Rather, it is a creative moment of experimentation and indeterminacy defined by multiple crises, multiple emergences, and their unpredictable interactions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a devastating toll on long-term care (LTC) residents, families, and staff. In an effort to keep residents safe from COVID-19, public health measures were implemented early in the pandemic to restrict visitation with residents in many countries, with subsequent adjustments made over the course of the pandemic. It is critical to understand the implementation process and how restrictions on visitations have impacted residents, families, and staff. This research note shares a summary of research interviews conducted with key informants in British Columbia (Canada), England (United Kingdom), and The Netherlands on the implementation of visitation programs in the COVID-19 context. It highlights leading practices and key challenges from these jurisdictions.

COVID-19 has disproportionally impacted older adults, and has highlighted many issues, including extreme deficiencies in Canadian long-term care homes and gaps in home and community care services for older adults. In recent years, there has been a push towards better patient and family engagement in health system research, and with the onset of the pandemic, engaging older adults in research and policy planning is more important than ever. In this article, we describe the Seniors Helping as Research Partners (SHARP) approach to engagement with older adults as an example of how partnerships that engage older adults in the development of research aims and processes can help to ensure that future research meets the needs of older adults. SHARP members highlighted a number of areas for future COVID-19 research such as improvements to long-term care, enhancing access to home and community care, and a focus on aging and social isolation.

The measures implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 affect the social relationships of the elderly. The aim of this article is to understand the effects of the pandemic on residents and resident-to-resident aggression (RRA). In total, 21 individual interviews were conducted with three groups of actors of four independent living facilities who have experienced RRA (residents) or who intervene in this type of situation (members of staff and external stakeholders). The participants reported that the pandemic has effects on residents and, specifically, on RRA. Among other things, the management and resolution of these situations have changed, and new manifestations of RRA are observed. To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the effects of the pandemic on residents living in independent living facilities and on RRA. It raises the need to further consider residents’ voices in this context and to combine them with those of other actors to better understand how RRA manifest itself.

Public health messages and societal discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic have consistently indicated a higher morbidity and mortality risk for older people, particularly those with multiple health conditions. Older adults’ interpretations of pandemic messaging can shape their perceived vulnerability and behaviours. This study examined their perspectives on COVID-19 messaging. Eighteen community-dwelling older adults residing in Manitoba (Canada) participated in semi-structured telephone interviews between July and August 2020, a period of low COVID-19 cases within the province. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify key themes that described participants’ processes of information interpretation when consuming pandemic-related messages, their emotional responses to messaging and consequent vulnerability, and the impacts of messaging on their everyday lives. Understanding how older adults have construed COVID-19 and pandemic-related messages, and the subsequent impact on their daily behaviours, is the first step towards shaping societal discourse and sets the stage for examining the pandemic’s long-term effects.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has had profound consequences on collective mental health and well-being, and yet, older adults appear better off than younger adults. The current study examined mental health impacts of the pandemic across adult age groups in a large sample (n = 5,320) of Canadians using multiple hierarchical regression analyses. Results suggest older adults are experiencing better mental health and more social connectedness relative to younger adults. Loneliness predicted negative mental health outcomes across all age groups, while the negative association between social support and mental health was only significant at average and high levels of loneliness in the 65–69 age group. Results point towards differential mental health impacts of the pandemic across adult age groups and indicate that loneliness and social support may be key intervention targets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research should further examine mechanisms of resiliency among older Canadian adults during the pandemic.

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, strict visitor restrictions were issued for long-term care facilities (LTCFs). A year later, restrictions are still in place and they continue to impact family members who have limited or no in-person contact with their relative in LTCFs. The goal of this qualitative longitudinal focused ethnography was to understand the experience of family members who have a relative in a LTCF where visiting has been restricted during the pandemic. Seventeen family members participated in two interviews that were 6 months apart. Data analysis highlighted five key drivers, defined as the workforce, communication deficits, characteristics of care, public health directives, and autonomy of relative which in turn resulted in three main themes: psychological distress, surveillance, and visiting challenges. This study provides a glimpse into the difficult experiences of families with a relative residing in a LTCF in the province of New Brunswick.