Twitter has just announced that the company will require all Canadian employees to be fully vaccinated before they are allowed to return to work.
This decision comes only one day after the federal government announced that it would require all public servants and workers in federally regulated sectors to be vaccinated to continue working.
According to Twitter Canada spokesperson Cam Gordon, “Safety was the reason.”
This decision will affect roughly 150 employees that work for the tech giant, mostly in Toronto, where a vaccine passport is being developed to restrict access for metropolitan urbanites who do not fall in line.
Notably, Mayor John Tory has been begging Ontario Premier Doug Ford to implement the passport for months — though Ford deferred to Justin Trudeau to mandate a province-wide vaccine passport and, thus, eschew his responsibility in the decision-making process.
While Twitter is the first major tech company to state that vaccines will be mandatory for its Canadian staff, it will certainly not be the last.
According to the CBC, who spoke with many tech giants, Google, Uber, Lyft, and Netflix have already stated that all their U.S. employees need to be fully vaccinated to return to work.
Moreover, these companies want to expand this policy to apply to workers globally.
“We currently are looking into local regulations globally where all our sites are located, including Canada,” Google spokesperson Wendy Manton said in an email to the CBC.
“First, anyone coming to work on our [U.S.] campuses will need to be vaccinated,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a Blog Post. “We’re rolling this policy out in the U.S. in the coming weeks and will expand to other regions in the coming months. The implementation will vary according to local conditions and regulations and will not apply until vaccines are widely available in your area.”
Likely, these corporate policy changes will not be implemented until October, however, as Google is “extending [its] global voluntary work-from-home policy through October 18.”
Much like the new federal mandate, the only exemptions to mandatory vaccination will be for those able to cite legitimate medical or religious reasons that prevent them from receiving the vaccine.
According to labour and employment lawyer Peter Straszynski, “There are businesses that are interested in mandatory vaccines. Clients are asking whether it’s legal for them to do it and what the restrictions are on their ability to do it.
“My view,” Straszynski continues, “is that you can mandate vaccinations. You just have to be careful of the exceptions. And the exceptions are human rights.”
When implemented, this decision will impact the roughly 2,000 Google employees who are dispersed throughout Ontario and Quebec.
