Ontario ice cream maker tarred by 'lies' from anti-vaxxers, this time after doctor's 'nice' tweet

One of Canada's most iconic brands of ice cream has found itself in the eye of a social media firestorm after an Ontario doctor's tweet became the target of anti-vaxxers.

Chapman's Ice Cream is one of Canada's best-known brands in dessert products, manufactured at its family-owned Markdale, Ont., plant, about a two-hour drive northwest of Toronto. 

The company has long positioned itself as a good corporate citizen, offering to buy a neighbourhood school to keep children of employees close to home, offering freezer space for the government's COVID-19 vaccination efforts, and keeping unvaccinated employees on staff at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic so long as they took two rapid tests a week. 

Now, the company is embroiled in a controversy over a tweet from Dr. Sohail Gandhi, who was out getting ice cream for his wife on Mother's Day. 

"I would not have expected the response I got," said Gandhi, a family physician based in Stayner and a past president of the Ontario Medical Association. 

"I baked a strawberry pie for my wife for Mother's Day and I needed some ice cream. So I went to the store, I happened to see Chapman's and I said, 'Hey, this is a good corporate citizen. I should support them,' so I tweeted about them." 

The tweet racked up thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, and while many of them were supportive, a number were critical and even downright hateful. 

"Some of the comments were basically insults," Dr. Ghandi said. "What I was surprised about was there were some people making allegations about the way Chapman's ran their business without having the facts to prove them." 

Those tweets — from allegations of firing employees who refused to get vaccinated, to misinformation about what the company puts in its ice cream — are lies, according to Ashley Chapman, the company's chief operating officer. 

"A nice doctor tweets something really nice about our product and suddenly all these really nasty people come back onto the scene," he said, referring to the fact his company has seen online backlash before, when it decided to keep workers who refused to get vaccinated on the payroll during the height of the Delta wave. 

"We were very concerned because we live in a small rural area, and a lot of these people who didn't get the vaccine, I know them, I know their families, I know they're good people.

"Being accused of segregation, medical fascism and some other insane things that people have been calling us, it just seems sad to be honest with you."

Chapman said he didn't want to let good people go, so he came up with a compromise: they could still report to work unvaccinated, but had to submit to a rapid test twice a week to keep others from getting sick. 

Vaccinated workers, on the other hand, would receive a raise of a dollar an hour because the company didn't have to pay for any tests.