National Post (National Edition)
PLANNING FOR ‘EVERY EVENTUALITY’
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ORDERING ALL THE PROTECTIVE GEAR IT CAN GET
To fight the pandemic, Canada has ordered millions of masks, gowns, gloves and hundreds of thousands of litres of hand sanitizer, but in a COVID-19 world, ordering supplies is not the same as getting them.
Ensuring the supplies ship out from factories in China — that the personal protective equipment actually reaches doctors and nurses — is the job of Public Services Minister Anita Anand.
Today’s problems are not the only ones she is focused on. Anand said she is buying both for now and for the future.
While there have been some encouraging signs recently that social distancing measures are working to curb the virus’s spread, the pandemic could last into the fall and hospitals that have so far been stressed could still be overwhelmed. Anand said they’re laying the groundwork for that.
“We are preparing for mobile units, and building up additional supplies for popup or community facilities. We also have an inventory of all available space in federal buildings and are assessing commercial hotel options to ensure that we can secure space,” said Anand about the long-term plans. “We are planning for every eventuality and every eventuality means multiple different types of procurement.”
Not surprisingly, demand for equipment has skyrocketed in the wake of the crisis, with countries around the world trying to get more. Stories have emerged of bidding wars on airport tarmac and supplies diverted during delivery from one country to another.
Anand said Canada is ordering everything it can, recognizing not everything will be delivered.
“Our approach is to order aggressively in the marketplace, fully cognizant of the risks poised by fragile supply chains,” she said. “There is a race globally for the same goods and this requires us to be proactive and aggressive.”
As of Thursday the government has ordered 290 million surgical masks, including 100 million from two Canadian suppliers, and has received 17 million so far. They have ordered 130 million N95 masks and expect to deliver two million to the provinces by next week.
They have also ordered 20 million litres, or eight Olympic-sized swimming pools, worth of hand sanitizer.
To ensure things are delivered, the government has hired two logistics companies to watch Canada’s shipments, and also employed diplomatic staff to keep an eye from the factory gate, to a new warehouse in Shanghai and on to their ultimate destination in Canada.
The warehouse in Shanghai means Canada can take possession even if all of the paperwork to ship items out of the country isn’t ready.
“We are watching goods from the moment we order them until the moment they arrive,” said Anand.
The effort is moving at full speed now, but there were missteps in the government’s efforts early on.
Bureaucrats speaking at the Commons health committee on Wednesday confirmed that 100,000 testing swabs the government ordered arrived contaminated and unusable in early April.
“It did put us in a bit of a scramble in the short term, but we are optimistic we have addressed it,” said Anand’s deputy minister Bill Matthews.
Matthews said supplies were coming from a reputable supplier who recalled other shipments because of problems, but missed these swabs in the recall.
CBC reported that last year the government threw away two million masks that had expired from a warehouse in Regina that was closed down, and the government has faced criticism for sending 16 tonnes of medical equipment to China in early February.
Conservative health critic MP Matt Jeneroux said in a statement the federal government failed to prepare.
“The government failed to proactively handle this issue and now we are seeing the result: an ill-prepared healthcare system in the midst of a pandemic.”
Health Minister Patty Hajdu was frank earlier this month that the government was not as prepared as it could have been and emergency warehouses were not as full as they should have been. “We likely did not have enough. I think federal governments for decades have been underfunding things like public-health preparedness, and I would say that obviously governments all across the world are in the same exact situation,” she said.
Dr. Theresa Tam, the country’s chief public health officer, said Thursday that they will be looking at how the national stockpiles were managed in the past, but they weren’t designed as a stop-gap for all provincial health systems.
“The national emergency strategic stockpile was not really set up to back up the whole of the country’s health-care system. That is the responsibility of provinces and territories and their stockpile,” she said. “We were more focused on highly pathogenic items and unusual items, such as the Ebola virus.”
Anand, a political rookie first elected in 2019, is a lawyer by trade. She oversees Public Services and Procurement Canada, a mammoth government department with the responsibility of fixing the Phoenix pay system, renovating Parliament Hill and buying everything the government needs, from sticky notes to fighter jets.
The other leg of the government’s response has been homegrown. Canada Goose has gone from making their iconic parkas to making medical gowns, and Stanfield’s has stopped making new underwear and is soon expected to be making 100,000 medical gowns per week.