One of Canada’s largest ice cream manufacturers, Chapman’s Ice Cream, is facing calls to boycott the company because of its vaccine policy requiring unvaccinated employees to get tested.

Tamara Al-Ghadhanfari. S@y News.

Chapman ice cream, a family-owned business in Markdale, Ontario, is facing backlash after their announcement to require unvaccinated employees to get rapid testing twice a week. The company is paying for the rapid test. But the company didn’t expect the attacks they received from anti-vaxxers groups.

Ashley Chapman, the company vice-president, said in an interview with CBC Radio that he didn’t expect this aggressive response to the company’s policy. The attacks targeted his family members, including his 78-year-old father calling him a Nazi and saying that the family should be convicted for war crimes.

“The reaction was pretty brutal, actually very, very aggressive. People were calling us, leaving messages after hours. I’ve been sent. The only thing I can say is hate packages in the mail,” Chapman told the CBC.

Chapman said only 100 of his 850 employees are not vaccinated. Among those 100, some received the first dose, and others plan to receive their first dose soon. “So, we’re expecting that that number to be whittled down, probably to half that, in maybe a month,” he said.

The policy is not the only reason behind the backlash; it was also because Chapman has given a 1 dollar raise to his vaccinated employees. Chapman said that he came to this decision to achieve equality among his employees.

“We calculated the cost per unvaccinated employee … and it worked out to about $40 per person. And I was sitting here chatting with my mother one morning, and it just felt like we were treating the unvaccinated better than we were vaccinated,” Chapman said.

 

 

 

In response to the calls to boycott Chapman’s company, the #IStandwithChapmans is circulating on social media to support the company and its policy.

Currently, only five employees of Chapman’s company are on unpaid leave for refusing to get vaccinated or conform with the company’s policy of testing.

“It’s crazy, it’s over the top, and it’s ignorant because they really don’t know what our policy is. They just assume that we’re evil and that we’ve fired hundreds of unvaccinated employees to teach them a lesson, which is absolutely not the case,” Chapman said.

Chapman received a flood of support from across the company, which he described as “just really nice.”

Chapman doesn’t expect any drop in revenues as a result of the boycott campaign.

“There’s just not enough Canadians that are anti-vax enough to send us hate mail and to affect our sales,” he told CBC. “They might think that their boycott could actually do something to us, but we would never notice.”