Poor management, panic Ppe-buying cost Quebec nearly $1 billion: report
QUEBEC — Quebec lost nearly $1 billion in the rush to acquire personal protection equipment (PPE) in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic , Quebec’s auditor-general said Wednesday.
And despite Quebec’s rapidly aging population, the Ministry of Health has not done a projection on the actual needs for long-term health care in 15 years, she said.
Releasing her May report, Guylaine Leclerc 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The emergency plans of health establishments were more than 10 years old — inadequate and out-of-date, Leclerc said.
There was also no real plan for stockpiling PPE, either.
“Owing to its lack of preparation, the ministry should have acted much more rapidly given all the warnings of the coming pandemic,” Leclerc said.
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.