Should childhood vaccinations be mandatory? Almost 70% of Canadians think so, according to a new poll

CBC

3 days ago

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Measles cases are surging across Canada, so it might not come as a surprise that nearly 70 per cent of Canadians surveyed recently agreed that childhood vaccinations should be mandatory.
The Angus Reid Institute polled nearly 1,700 Canadian adults online between May 20 and May. 23, asking them if proof of immunization should be required for kids to attend daycare or schools.
Sixty-nine per cent said yes — an increase from last year, when only 55 per cent of respondents agreed that vaccinations should be mandatory for kids.
Maxwell Smith, a bioethicist and associate professor at Western University's School of Health Studies, says the figure suggests mandating childhood vaccinations is not as divisive as once thought.
"Given what we just experienced with COVID and controversies around vaccine mandates, I think this is why this figure is quite striking," he said.
Canada is in the midst of the worst measles outbreak since the virus was declared eliminated back in 1998. Ontario remains the heart of the outbreak: Public Health Ontario said 1,938 people have gotten sick with measles so far in 2025.
Smith says those numbers may have changed peoples' minds.
"In these circumstances, where you have an unprecedented measles outbreak and you have the lives of children on the line, sometimes, that's the tipping point," he said.
In Ontario and New Brunswick, proof of vaccination is already required for children to attend school. But parents can get an exemption in both provinces for medical, religious or philosophical reasons, as long as they fill out a form.
In Ontario, they also have to watch a vaccine education video. Parents who sign an exemption must also agree to pull their kids out of school or daycare if there is an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease.
When asked if the government should rethink this policy as measles burns through pockets of unvaccinated communities, Premier Doug Ford said he can't make parents vaccinate their children.
"How do you force someone? Do you grab their kid and start jabbing them with a needle?" he told reporters earlier this month.
The Angus Reid poll also asked respondents how confident they were that their provincial governments could handle a measles outbreak. It found that 27 per cent of those surveyed in Ontario said they had no confidence at all.
Respondents in Alberta had even less trust: 37 per cent of respondents said they had no confidence in their province's ability to respond to a measles outbreak — even as cases continue to climb in that province. So far this year, 628 Albertans have been diagnosed with measles.
The survey only polled people in the 10 provinces and did not cover Nunavut, Northwest Territories or Yukon.
Online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population, but a randomized sample of the size of the Angus Reid poll would yield a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
WATCH | What you should know about measles:
Measles: Understanding the most contagious preventable disease | About That
1 year ago
Duration 10:16
There are early signals that measles — one of the world's most contagious but preventable diseases — may be spreading in parts of Canada. Andrew Chang breaks down the way the virus attacks the body and what makes it so contagious.