Justin Trudeau refuses to say if he supports taxing the unvaccinated

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This article was published 11/01/2022 (982 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says further details of Quebec’s proposed tax on unvaccinated residents will be “extremely important” to ensure it respects the legal requirements of public health care in Canada.

The Quebec government has assured Ottawa the proposal — the first financial penalty for people who refuse COVID-19 vaccines in Canada — will not violate the federal Canada Health Act, which includes principles of universality and equal access, Trudeau told reporters Wednesday on Parliament Hill.

But he repeatedly refused to say whether he agrees with the principle of taxing people who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19, stating it is a “complex” issue and that his government needs more details about how Quebec’s proposal would work.

He also said provinces are “right” to be looking at different ways to motivate people to get vaccinated, as cases of the Omicron variant skyrocket across the country and strain hospital capacity.

“We want to ensure the principles of the Canada Health Act are respected,” Trudeau said in French.

Later, in English, he added, “The details will be important in how this works, how it balances the values and the rights that we all cherish as Canadians with the necessity of keeping people safe.”

Trudeau did not say whether Ottawa is considering similar taxes for unvaccinated Canadians, and instead pointed to existing federal incentives like the vaccination mandate for government workers and requirements to get shots for people who take planes and trains in Canada.

He urged all Canadians to get their booster doses and to ensure children aged five to 11 — 45 per cent of whom have received a first dose — get their shots, too.

Later Wednesday, while touring a vaccination site at the Toronto Zoo, Premier Doug Ford said Ontario would not follow Quebec with a tax for people who refuse to get vaccinated.

“We aren’t going down that road,” Ford said. “But I implore, I ask, I beg — every single person that’s not vaccinated, please, protect yourself, protect your family, protect co-workers. Please, get your vaccination.”

Ontario chief medical officer Dr. Kieran Moore said he has not and would not recommend such a tax to Ford’s government. “It does, in my mind, seem punitive,” Moore said.

Other critics of such a tax have said it could create a “slippery slope,” for example, raising questions about extra health taxes for smokers.

With hospitals crammed and 62 more COVID-19 deaths in the previous 24 hours, Quebec Premier François Legault made the surprise announcement on Tuesday that his Coalition Avenir Québec government would impose a “significant” tax on people in the province who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19. He said it would be similar to drug-insurance coverage that some Quebecers pay when they file their annual taxes.

“All people who are not vaccinated for non-medical reasons will have to pay a contribution,” Legault said, suggesting the amount people will be required to pay will be more than $100.

Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé later announced that 7,000 people in the province had signed up for their first doses on the day Legault announced the proposed tax, up from 5,000 the day before.

Writing on Twitter, he called it the highest level in several days. “It’s encouraging,” he said.

Quebec’s proposal came just days after federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos mused about the possibility of mandatory vaccinations as infections of the highly contagious Omicron variant skyrocket across Canada. On Wednesday, Duclos said his conception of mandates would be measures to encourage people, not force them, to get vaccinated.

“No one, I believe, is thinking or certainly speaking of forcibly, physically vaccinating people in Canada,” he said, pointing instead to existing measures such as mandatory vaccinations for people who work in the federal bureaucracy and travel on passenger planes.

While unvaxxed taxes are rare around the world, Quebec would not be the first jurisdiction to create one. Greece announced last November that people over 60 who refused to be vaccinated would have to pay 100 euros per month. In Singapore, unvaccinated patients must pay their own hospital bills.

Don Davies, the NDP’s health critic and an MP from Vancouver, said his party has not yet discussed Quebec’s “novel and unusual” proposal, but that he is concerned such measures could interfere with what he described as a bedrock principle of Canadian public health care: universal access.

“We’ll be guarding that principle very carefully,” Davies said, adding that he believes governments would be wiser to put more resources into education campaigns and other efforts to get more children vaccinated and ensure more people obtain their booster doses as soon as possible.

One way to do that would be for the federal government to rally military resources to help give vaccinations in the provinces, he said.

As of Jan. 1, roughly 77 per cent of the Canadian population had received two doses of COVID-19 vaccine, while around 17 per cent had received a booster shot, according to federal data.

With files from Rob Ferguson

Alex Ballingall is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @aballinga