BREAKING: MANDATORY vaccination policy likely on its way, says Trudeau Health Minister

Trudeau's Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said on Friday that Canada's provinces are likely to take up mandatory vaccination policies to deal with COVID-19.

The minister insisted that vaccinations remain the only way out of the pandemic.

"What we see now is that our health care system in Canada is fragile, our people are tired, and the only way that we know to get through COVID-19, this variant and any future variant, is through vaccination," said the health minister.

"Fifty per cent of hospitalizations now, in Quebec, are due to people not having been vaccinated...That's a burden on health care workers, a burden on society which is very difficult to bear and for many people difficult to understand.

"That's why I'm signaling this is a conversation which I believe provinces and territories, in support with the federal government, will want to have over the next weeks and months."

Duclos said that conversations on mandatory vaccination have not yet started, but that they would soon due to what has been observed internationally.

As pointed out by True North's Andrew Lawton, the federal minister is calling for what is essentially an "Austria-style vaccine mandate."

Those who refuse the jab in Austria already face $4,000 fines every three months.

Experts are not unanimous on vaccinations being the only way out of the pandemic. According to Dr. Harvey Risch, "the only way we will get out of this whole COVID pandemic is having a large amount of natural immunity throughout the population."

"It's not going to happen from vaccine immunity because vaccine immunity lasts only a few months and it's too narrow. It doesn't get all the variants. The natural immunity from having had mild or asymptomatic COVID is much stronger and that's what's going to fight off the variants," he told FOX News.