Last March, around the time that Ontario health authorities linked an outbreak of measles to a Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick, Rick Cober Bauman received an email from Canada’s then-chief public health officer Theresa Tam. 

Tam, who led Canada’s national health response to COVID-19, was asking the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for help informing their community about the ongoing measles epidemic. Bauman — a former MCC executive director — had stayed on as the organization’s main point of contact for Ontario’s “plain” Mennonites and Amish: culturally conservative rural Anabaptist communities, known for their modest dress sense and traditional modes of transportation, like horse and buggies.

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“There was a certain content, I guess, in having [the federal government] take faith communities as serious conversation partners,” Bauman said. 

Tam’s email, it turned out, was part of a larger effort by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to confront measles vaccine hesitancy — not only within Mennonite communities, but across faith communities in Canada. While vaccine hesitancy in religious communities is declining, many faith-based communities in Canada remain on the front lines of the ongoing measles resurgence. Four days after Tam’s email to Bauman, Ontario’s chief public health officer Dr. Kieran Moore linked the ongoing outbreak in Ontario to a large Mennonite get-together in New Brunswick last year in a written memo to his........

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