Canada’s francophone province of Quebec is set to gate liquor and cannabis stores with vaccine passports, according to Montreal media.
A Google translated version of a Jan. 4 French-language article in le Journal de Montreal stated, “According to the information obtained, the decision was taken in the last few hours by Quebec, which should announce the details of this measure in a press briefing this week.”
The decision referenced is regarding “to impose the vaccination passport in the branches of the Société des Alcools du Quebec (SAQ) and the Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC).”
In August, Quebec was the first in the country to trailblaze the installation of vaccine passports, a move that was quickly followed by each and every other Province.
In October, the federal government unveiled a standardized, central QR-code based vaccine passport system based on the SMART Health Cards protocol, that has or is in the process of being rolled out to each and every Province.
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SMART is based on the Vaccine Credentials Initiative announced in January of 2021 by a consortium including Oracle, Mayo Clinic, Salesforce, Microsoft, and The Commons Project. The latter is backed by globalist entities The Rockefeller Foundation and the World Economic Forum.
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Currently, Quebec’s vaccine passport is only required to access the usual litany of non-essential businesses such as gyms, restaurants, bars, and movie theaters.
The Montreal Journal stated the Provincial government was under pressure “to tighten the screws on the unvaccinated,” as it quoted Premier Francois Legault during a press conference as saying, “I understand that there is a certain anger” towards the unvaccinated.
“In order to mark people’s minds, the CAQ [Bloc Quebecois] government therefore decided on the branches of the SQDC [cannabis] and the SAQ [liquor], which continued to record increases in sales and profits during the pandemic,” stated the article.
In an effort to struggle against the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Quebec again-reinstated a 10:00 p.m. curfew on citizens, starting on New Year’s Eve.
Videos posted to social media on New Year’s Day showed dystopian scenes of Quebec’s metropolitan centers being swarmed by police enforcing the edict, which violations of are punishable by a $1,000 to $6,000 fine.
When the liquor and cannabis store mandate comes into effect, it will only apply to customers and not employees. This decision stands in contrast to neighboring Ontario’s provincial edict that liquor and cannabis store staff members show their papers in order to maintain employment at all.
The Confederation of National Trade Unions, which many of the SQDC and SAQ employees are unionized under, was quoted as being unsympathetic to customers and workers by the Journal in a written statement, “It is the employer or the government who can decide on compulsory vaccination.”
“What a union can do is put in place an information strategy for its members to encourage vaccination. By email, video and press release, they were encouraged to get their first, second or third dose of vaccine.”
Somewhat surprisingly, the planned move appears unpopular even with Canada’s establishment media. Montreal’s CTV News quoted an infectious disease expert as characterizing the measure as “analogous to trying to put out a raging forest fire with a glass of water.”
“Unless the government has access to public health data that there have been a massive number of transmissions linked to SAQs or SQDCs, which I doubt, adding a measure like that now would not be expected to have any more than a minor impact,” he stated.
According to the Government of Quebec’s COVID-19 Vaccination Data website, 84.5 percent of eligible Quebecors have already accepted at least one dose of an injection.
The Government of Canada’s website says that 78.05 percent of all Quebecors have been fully vaccinated, while as much as 90.01 percent of the entire country aged 12-and-up has taken at least one dose.
In early December, neighboring Province to Quebec, New Brunswick, briefly gave grocery stores the option of requiring vaccine passports for entry, but was forced to quietly walk back the move only a few weeks later after public outrage and threats of legal action from constitutional law non-profit the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.
Quebec is actually not the first place in Canada to require health papers to purchase state-sanctioned recreational drugs. In October, Saskatchewan’s provincial government dropped a sudden vaccine passport mandate on Oct. 1 that kept the unvaccinated out of small business liquor stores, but not those owned and operated by grocery store mega corporations.
