Quebec lost nearly $1 billion on PPE

Auditor general blasts panic buying early in pandemic

Poor management of personal protective equipment in the health care system and the mad rush to acquire more when the COVID -19 pandemic hit resulted in a loss of nearly $1 billion in taxpayers' money, Quebec's auditor general said Wednesday.

And despite Quebec's rapidly aging population and increasing life expectancy, the Ministry of Health has not done a projection on longterm health care needs in 15 years, Guylaine Leclerc said.

If services are not increased, many seniors suffering from a significant drop in their autonomy will not get the care — in a CHSLD or at home — that they require. Just looking after the 20,000 additional people in this growing category of citizens expected to be added by 2028 will cost the government an additional $2 billion a year.

The number of Quebecers aged over 70 is expected rise by 69 per cent, from 1,162,204 today to 1,964,245 by 2040.

“The minister immediately needs to reflect on how he will serve these people and how he will finance this,” Leclerc said at a news conference after tabling her spring report in the National Assembly.

The rest of her report is equally tough, with Leclerc tearing a strip off the Legault government over its handling of the pandemic. She said the health and social services network was unprepared — with no “complete and reliable” data on the amounts of masks, gowns, gloves, visors and disinfectants available for health establishments — when the pandemic hit.

The emergency plans of health establishments were more than 10 years old — inadequate and out-ofdate, Leclerc said. There was also no real plan for stockpiling PPE, either. Even after supplies started to arrive, nearly half of the employees in long-term homes (CHSLDS) and private retirement homes had not been trained in how to use them correctly.

“Owing to its lack of preparation, the ministry should have acted much more rapidly given all the warnings of the coming pandemic,” Leclerc said in her report.

Minus some form of a stockpile and forced to resort to paying inflated prices for the products in the global race for PPE, the ministry spent more than $3 billion on such goods between Jan. 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. Prices eventually dropped, leading to a net loss for the Quebec government of $938 million as of March 31, 2021.

In its panic, Quebec also was not always able to verify the integrity of the suppliers, which resulted in close to $15 million in financial losses and over $170 million in lawsuits against suppliers who were paid for products that “were never delivered or deemed inadequate.”

“The poor quality of the information on hand on the inventory did not favour an informed decision-making process on the supply and distribution to establishments,” Leclerc said in her report.

The auditor general notes that the government understood in the past the need to keep an inventory of PPE. In 2006, the government created a reserve to deal with possible pandemics and much of it was used to fight the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

By 2010, the reserve was exhausted.

However, “following this no measure was put in place to make up for the elimination of the reserve,” Leclerc writes, calling the government's actions to replenish the reserve “tardy.”

The Ministry of Health only whirled into action after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on Jan. 30, 2020. A first order for more masks was not made until Feb. 18, 2020. The bulk of the buy, however, did not happen until mid-march, after Quebec declared its own health emergency.

Other provinces acted much sooner. Alberta doubled its order of PPE way back on Dec. 15, 2019, in anticipation of the worst.

“Sane management happens with sane planning,” Leclerc said at a news conference following the tabling of her report in the National Assembly. “We don't know when or how the next pandemic will arrive, but one thing is clear: there will be more.”

“What I recognize is that we were not ready,” Health and Social Services Minister Christian Dubé told reporters later as he left a meeting of cabinet.

“We acted fast enough with the second wave, but we learned from what happened. Remember in the second wave it was no longer an issue.

“If you look at today, we now have Quebec suppliers. It's no longer an issue.”

The opposition parties were not impressed.

“The government of Quebec was asleep at the switch while others were organizing themselves,” Parti Québécois health critic Joël Arseneau said in the legislature in asking a question of Premier François Legault.

“Since that time we have adjusted a little bit like everywhere else,” Legault responded.

“We are now much less dependant on foreign (suppliers) and we have access to protective equipment produced here.”

We don't know when or how the next pandemic will arrive, but one thing is clear: there will be more.