Because you are the main purchaser, is there not some mechanism where PSPC looks and says, ”Jeez, we haven't ordered anything in six years; perhaps we need to follow up”, or is it merely passing the buck to another department?
A follow-up question to that is, when did you actually start the purchasing in a major way? The reason I ask is that, when we started the daily phone calls with Health, I think in the second week or the first week after we rose from sitting, I asked a question about respirators. We were told on the call from the department that we're not buying any respirators and we don't need them. The very next week, I think it was March 26, I asked a question about PPE, and the comment came back—this was from all the government departments sitting around the phone—that we are not buying any more PPE and we don't need it.
Here we have your predecessor saying that ensuring the national stockpile is not a priority. It's not listed once in your departmental plans, although I do note that banning plastic straws is a priority, but not the PPE. Then we have the government itself in the conference calls to members of Parliament stating, almost up to the end of March, that respirators and PPE are not needed.
When did we decide they were needed? When did we start the major purchasing?