Nurses represent the highest proportion of healthcare workers globally and have played a vital role during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has shed light on multiple vulnerabilities that have impacted the nursing workforce including critical levels of staffing shortages in Canada. A review sponsored by the Royal Society of Canada investigated the impact of the pandemic on the nursing workforce in Canada to inform planning and implementation of sustainable nursing workforce strategies. The review methods included a trend analysis of peer-reviewed articles, a jurisdictional scan of policies and strategies, analyses of published surveys and interviews of nurses in Canada, and a targeted case study from Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. Findings from the review have identified longstanding and COVID-specific impacts, gaps, and opportunities to strengthen the nursing workforce. These findings were integrated with expert perspectives from national nursing leaders involved in guiding the review to arrive at recommendations and actions that are presented in this policy brief. The findings and recommendations from this policy brief are meant to inform a national and sustained focus on retention and recruitment efforts in Canada.

Unlike occurrences of other contagious diseases such as cholera and smallpox, the 1918-19 influenza pandemic did not lead to anti-immigrant backlash, the stigmatization of newcomers as disease carriers, or aggressive quarantine measures focused against immigrant groups. During influenza outbreaks in several major Canadian cities, quarantine was either rejected or was a low-priority containment measure, reluctantly and sceptically employed. Blaming immigrants during the epidemic was not considered enlightened public health practice or good disease containment strategy. Retrospective evaluation of the successes and failures of the fight against influenza concluded that coercive measures such as quarantine did more harm than good. The experience with influenza contributed to new notions of immigrant inclusion in the social body.

During the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 in Winnipeg, several hundred predominantly Anglo-Canadian middle- and upper-class women volunteered to nurse and feed victims of the disease, particularly the poor of the city's north end. The contact between victim and volunteer, north and south, promoted a sense of social order, but was simultaneously unsettling for the women involved and for the broader community. The paper utilizes Mary Louise Pratt's notion of “contact zone” to suggest that the extraordinary qualities of social interaction during the epidemic, when lives normally lived apart intersected, were a source of social tension. This tension was partially resolved through limitations upon who fit the role of volunteer, principles of scientific management and professionalism, and the construction of an ideal feminine heroine. Individual women's volunteerism nevertheless reflected a more ambiguous experience.