Domestic production of ventilators beginning

Dozens of deals also in works for personal protective equipment

Rick Jamieson is riding an adrenalin rush.

The Guelph brake pad manufacturer — who calls himself the “chief energizing officer” of a new consortium called Ventilators for Canada — scrambled for two weeks to nail an actual deal.

Now he is pretty sure the first of about 30,000 new made-inCanada ventilators ordered by Ottawa will be rolling off a Baylis Medical assembly line by mid-May.

It will be a slow start, he says, maybe just 125 at first.

But if Canada can indeed quickly crank up domestic production, it will ease a country’s mind during a tense global race to secure the critical machines.

Ventilators breathe for and provide life-saving oxygen to COVID-19 patients whose lungs are swimming with fluids, and right now the machines are in high demand around the world. So are respirator masks, medical gowns and other personal protective equipment for health workers.

The federal government tried to reassure Canadians on Tuesday that help is on the way. It has ordered:

> 30,000 new ventilators through four companies and organizations, on top of 1,000 announced last week.

> More than 230 million surgical masks. More than 16 million have already been delivered.

> About 75 million N95 respirator masks, which block most virus-laden particles, are on order. Ottawa expects to receive roughly 2.3 million masks by the end of the week.

> More than 113,000 litres of hand sanitizer, most of which is expected to be delivered this month. Some 20,000 litres have already been received and 10,000 litres are expected later this week.

The scramble is real and highstakes.

Ottawa leased a warehouse in Shanghai and has dispatched embassy personnel and three charter cargo flights to China to secure deliveries.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday that his call last month for help to ramp up production of much needed medical supplies led to an avalanche of more than 5,000 offers from Canadian manufacturers, engineers and scientists. The federal government signed an early batch of deals that it hopes will produce the 31,000 new ventilators and millions of protective medical gowns in Canada. There are currently about 5,000 ventilators in Canada, federal officials have said.

Rick Jamieson says Toronto’s Baylis Medical, which specializes in making cardiac and spinal devices, will switch production to make10,000 of the new ventilators.

Jamieson wheeled and dealed for two weeks, first trying to persuade a leading British ventilator company to licence its design to be made here through the group that Jamieson and Jim Estil, of Danby Appliances, assembled.

Jamieson says the British group “backed out at the last minute,” fearing they’d face new and tough competition for parts that are harder and harder to buy in the global market.

Jamieson tried and failed to persuade Dyson to license its design and tried a few other routes, before Baylis — which buys most of its materials in southern Ontario — encouraged the group to use an opensource design provided to the world by medical manufacturing giant Medtronic.

The federal government continues to look at other proposals as well, said Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Navdeep Bains in an exclusive interview with the Star, and is moving quickly on ventilators. “We’re trying to build as many as possible,” he said. “If we have more solutions coming in the next few days and we can scale it, we will do that. It’s buy, buy, buy, build, build, build.”

Trudeau said the order for 30,0000 ventilators is “a big number,” but doesn’t necessarily reflect the government’s projections for how many Canadians will need them.

“We certainly hope we do not get anywhere near that number,” he said, but “we need to be ready for any circumstances,” including the need to help other countries.

Other suppliers are Thornhill

Medical, which had already agreed last week to supply1,000 machines (plus 40 to Ontario); the Canadian aerospace and defence supply and training company CAE; and a group led by StarFish Medical, a Victoria medical device and technology company, working with auto parts maker Linamar.

Bains signed deals with Intertape in Nova Scotia, which makes construction housewrap, and AutoLiv of Tilbury, Ont., which makes car airbags. They will switch to producing protective material for medical gowns. The federal government signed 22 letters of intent with Canadian apparel manufacturers like Arc’teryx and Canada Goose to make medical gowns using those materials. Medical gowns come in a range of materials to prevent infection transmission and those materials have generally come from outside Canada, said Bains. The money for all this is to come out of a $2-billion pool that Ottawa set aside to mobilize domestic production of medical supplies, testing kits and vaccine research in the fight against COVID-19.