The requirement for a vaccination passport goes badly with Quebec hardware stores. “An express survey” of members of the Quebec Association of Hardware and Building Materials (AQMAT) indicates that 69% of owners “consider it a bad idea” to require such proof of vaccination.
This statistic was deduced from the responses of 207 respondents, out of the approximately 900 hardware stores in Quebec, specifies AQMAT in an open letter sent Wednesday to the Legault government.
“From an informed source, construction contractors and their workers would show a rate of non-vaccination higher than the 8 to 10% that the media talk about for the general population”, notes Richard Darveau, president of AQMAT. The wall erected by the vaccine passport between these workers and the building materials will thus become “one more stick in the wheels of economic recovery”, he pleads.
In a series of arguments, Richard Darveau maintains that the measure will in any case be temporary “due to the fact that the Omicron variant demonstrates its relative seriousness a little more every day”. In addition, “no non-vaccinated will show up at the department stores, so we will have installed technical and human paraphernalia that are unnecessarily cumbersome, expensive and possibly a generator of the spread of the virus due to the queues. »
“If the hunt for the hard core of the unvaccinated in which you are asking our troops, their employees and their customers to participate seems disproportionate to us, it is above all its collateral damage that worries us and which will probably take the form of a worsening of the social and health climate, the labor shortage and the already weakened financial health of thousands of retail businesses,” continues Richard Darveau.
Stores of more than 1,500 square meters will have to require proof of vaccination to authorize entries into shops from next Monday.
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