This paper examines Canada's liberal welfare state in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that contrary to claims that the pandemic is affecting both rich and poor equally, its impact is both gendered, racialized and class-related. It thereby exacerbates existing social and health inequalities. Responsible for much of this is Canada's welfare state that reproduces established patterns of power that create systemic social and health inequalities. In addition, the responses of the Canadian liberal welfare state to the COVID-19 pandemic make explicit its underdeveloped nature and its difficulties in responding to social and health inequalities. This paper shows how the political foundation and organizational logic of the liberal welfare state promotes and reinforces existing inequalities. Similarly, its responses to the pandemic reflect crisis management that meets immediate urgencies but does little to provide long-term economic and social security to citizens.

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We argue that a new form of finance capital has been consolidated in the United States since the 2008 crisis—defined as a fusion of financial and industrial capital. In this regime, financiers have become more entrenched in the governance of nonfinancial corporations while, reciprocally, industrial firm managers have increasingly become financiers. Indeed, this fusion has taken place on two interconnected levels: (1) within the nonfinancial corporation itself, and (2) between the nonfinancial corporation and the financial sector. Internal diversification and internationalization over the postwar era led to the reorganization of the industrial corporation as a financial group, managing not concrete production processes, but portfolios of financial assets. This was reinforced by the increasing power of outside investors over the neoliberal period. However, new forms of financial organization that emerged after 2008 produced tighter and more direct linkages between external financiers and the nonfinancial corporation, constituting the new finance capital.

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