A new poll suggests a majority of Canadians support the idea of a lockdown on non-essential businesses and services during the holidays to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sixty-five per cent of respondents in the poll conducted by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies said they supported a general lockdown in their provinces to tackle the pandemic, while 29 per cent opposed.
The support for a lockdown comes as a continuing surge of new cases of COVID-19 across the country is upending traditional holiday plans starting next week.
It also coincides with the first Canadians receiving inoculations against the novel coronavirus on Monday using a vaccine approved by Health Canada.
Despite the excitement surrounding the arrival of those Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, only 66 per cent of respondents said they plan to get shots when they become more widely available.
Sixteen per cent said they had no plans to get a vaccine while 18 per cent did not know, suggesting one in three continues to remain hesitant when it comes to the shots.
The poll of 1,528 adult Canadians in an online panel was conducted from Dec. 11 to Dec. 13 and cannot be assigned a margin of error because internet-based polls are not considered random.