Hardware store owners believe that the government is on the “wrong road” by imposing the vaccination passport on customers of renovation centers over 1,500 m2. Nearly 69% of them oppose this measure, according to a survey conducted earlier this week by the Quebec Association of Hardware and Building Materials (AQMAT).
Posted at 1:03 p.m.
In a letter sent Wednesday to the Minister of Economy and Innovation, Pierre Fitzgibbon and his colleague Minister of Labor, Jean Boulet, the AQMAT asks Quebec to reconsider its decision. As of Monday, supermarkets, except grocery stores and pharmacies, will have to require consumers to present their vaccination passport before entering to do their shopping. About 120 hardware stores will have to comply with this rule.
“In the majority opinion of the 207 respondents, a representative score since Quebec has less than 900 hardware stores and renovation centers, your government is on the wrong track (by imposing) the vaccination passport at the entrance to stores of a certain size. starting next Monday and must backtrack,” reads the letter signed by AQMAT President and CEO Richard Darveau.
“Indeed, it is in a proportion of 69% that our members, economic operators, large employers, major tax contributors, consider that it is a bad idea to believe that splitting businesses into two categories will reduce the viral contamination and will decongest the health system, ”he also writes.
“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. »
AQMAT is not the only one to react unfavorably to this new measure. Last week, the president of the Renaud-Bray group, Blaise Renaud, asked the government to exempt the book industry.