This paper introduces evidence that for-profit long-term care providers are associated with less successful outcomes in COVID-19 outbreak management. We introduce two sets of theoretical arguments that predict variation in service quality by provider type: those that deal with the institution of contracting (innovative competition versus erosive competition) and those that address organizational features of for-profit, nonprofit, and government actors (profit-seeking, cross-subsidization, and future investment). We contextualize these arguments through a discussion of how contracting operates in Ontario long-term care. That analysis leads us to exclude the institutional arguments, while retaining the arguments about organizational features as our three hypotheses. Using outbreaks data as of February 2021, we find that government long-term care homes (LTCHs) surpassed for-profit and nonprofit homes in outbreak management, consistent with an earlier finding from Stall and colleagues (2020). Nonprofit homes outperform for-profit homes but are outperformed by government homes. These results are consistent with the expectations derived from two theoretical arguments—profit-seeking and cross-subsidization—and inconsistent with a third—capacity for future investment.

This article offers a critical assessment of empirical knowledge regarding labour market training and skills development in an era of technological disruption. Although exactly which skills and jobs will become obsolete is not known, technological change may cause unemployment to spike and increase the need for retraining. To move toward understanding what policy interventions will be needed in response, in this article we assess the current state of knowledge about Canada’s active labour market policies. We argue that before creating new programs, policy-makers need to learn from existing policy attempts to address labour market disruptions. By analyzing the most recent Employment and Social Development Canada evaluations, we find that quality data and analyses regarding the effectiveness of these programs are lacking. We conclude that research in this area is needed before policy-makers will be able to develop responses to technological disruption.

We assess Canada's labour market policy mix in order to determine whether the inclusive growth and innovation agenda indicates that technological change has triggered a policy paradigm shift. Our analysis of four policy areas concerning labour market access indicates no paradigm shift has occurred. Instead, the agenda is an example of policy resistance: first‐ and second‐order policy changes (changes to policy settings) maintain the status quo of labour market arrangements. The result is a revised set of supply‐side policies unlikely to reorganize the labour market. Technological disruption and the COVID‐19 pandemic offer opportunities to reorganize Canada's labour market policies' current policy mix, but, even under the banner of inclusive innovation, this shift is unlikely to happen.