Government Operations Committee on April 14th, 2021

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here.

Minister, we are seeing you at our committee an average of once per month, I believe. It's great to see you again. I think I finished off almost my last meeting asking you questions—

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I like you guys.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

We certainly appreciate your spending time with us. Just over two weeks ago, I think, you were here on the supplementary estimates. As I said, it's good to see you again.

I want to focus my questions on vaccine targets. We've just finished quarter one. I've been listening to what different politicians have been saying. I know that there's a lot of misinformation out there. We heard that no Canadian would be vaccinated until 2030 and that Canada would be at the back of the line with regard to vaccines. There continue to be politicians who are saying that Canada continues to be at the back of the line. I know that these statements are not accurate, because we have third party verification. We have a COVID-19 tracker, which I look at every day to see where we're at. I know that this is not a government body.

Could you speak for a moment with regard to the first quarter of this year and how our vaccine procurement program progressed?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I will say that I have been very aggressive with the department in terms of pressing the suppliers of approved vaccines to continue to accelerate doses, by which I mean move doses up. Rather than be satisfied with six million doses alone coming to Canada by the end of March, I told the department that we should broaden the negotiations. I said we should be aggressive with suppliers and also branch out to additional sources of supply such as the United States and negotiate for delivery of doses from the U.S., as we saw with the 1.5 million doses coming into Canada from AstraZeneca. I also said with regard to current suppliers—Pfizer and Moderna, for example—that we should be aggressive in pressing them for additional earlier deliveries. Pfizer did come forward and give us 1.5 million additional doses earlier in the quarter.

That's the work we do every day to make sure suppliers are being pressed into earlier and earlier deliveries. As I said, we have moved up 22 million doses to earlier quarters because of that negotiation.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you for that answer. I certainly appreciate it.

I remember speaking to local media. They had asked me when I was going to raise my voice in terms of a potential vaccine shortage. I told them that the contract said six million doses by the end of March. Obviously, we know that we have now received more than 9.5 million doses before the end of March.

You could have sat back and said that they respected their timeline. How is it that you and your department negotiated and planned to ensure that we were able to get the doses to Canadians, and get more doses than expected?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I will say that we work hard to make sure that our relationships with our suppliers are maintained and are strong. That allows us to continue to press them for additional deliveries. We have ongoing discussions with them to advance the acceleration of doses.

There is a relationship issue that has to be understood in the context of these negotiations. We come to the table. We tell Pfizer, for example, exactly what it is that we would like to see. I will say that Pfizer has been a very strong partner for Canada in terms of continuing to accelerate deliveries in a time when Canada and all Canadians would like to see more and more vaccines.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

That's great.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think I'm probably going to be out of time soon, so I'll just stop it here. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Drouin.

We'll go to Ms. Vignola for six minutes.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Anand, thank you for joining us again.

Let me talk about numbers first, in terms of quantities ordered and delivery dates. I'm not talking about the vaccines, but rather the medical ventilators. There are 40,547 ventilators on order as of March 31. So far, 27,388 have been received, but only 2% are being used.

So what about the rest of the ventilators? How is this being handled? What happens to the unused ventilators and those that have not yet been delivered? Will they be refunded or resold?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you for the question.

Let me remind you that we are in the third wave. I think we need these ventilators now. Right now, there are 359 people using ventilators here in Ontario. We have received over 27,000 ventilators for the national strategic emergency stockpile and for frontline health care workers.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Yes, but we ordered more than 40,000.

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

That is part of what we are doing as a government to make sure that we are there for the frontline health care workers.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Ms. Anand, I understand that we may need them, but we ordered more than 40,000. Even if you multiply by 10 the number of ventilators that are needed in Ontario right now, which I will round up to 400, that is 4,000 ventilators. But 47,000 were ordered and 27,000 have been received. What do we do with the surplus ventilators?

This is not a criticism. Yes, the ventilators are useful, but the surplus ones are not.

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I understand. It's a good question.

We responded to the Public Health Agency of Canada and ISED, which put forward the number of 40,000 ventilators, and we may well have excess ventilators. I believe that discussions are ongoing with the Public Health Agency of Canada regarding the excess, if there is an excess.

I'll ask my deputy minister to describe those discussions.

[Bill Matthews]

Thank you, Madam Minister.

As the member and the minister have already indicated, we may have too many ventilators. So there are several options. We could keep them in case we need them in the future. Alternatively, we could see if other countries need them. However, as far as I know, there are already a lot of ventilators all over the world right now. So, I'm not sure whether we need our extra ventilators, but we will continue to discuss with other countries.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you very much.

We also ordered 100 refrigerators and 700 freezers for storage. How many of those are currently in use?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

You're exactly right. We have ordered a number of supplies, including syringes, needles, gauze and freezers. We have ordered 700 freezers of different temperatures and sizes, with 433 freezers already deployed.

We have to remember, as I said earlier, that Pfizer and Moderna are the workhorses in our vaccine portfolio, and we need to have the supplies necessary, such as freezers, to ensure that they can be administered across the country.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

I completely agree.

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

In terms of how many are being used and whether we have enough, I will ask Bill Matthews to add his knowledge on this question.

[Bill Matthews]

Thank you, Minister.

Not an excess, but the majority of freezers have been deployed out to provinces and territories. The Public Health Agency of Canada would be able to provide an exact answer on the numbers, but we think that things have gone quite well on the freezer front so far.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

That's great news. I like it when things are useful.

We have also ordered the supplies to administer over 75 million doses of vaccine, including syringes. We have received enough supplies to administer 74 million, which is excellent.

First, do we have enough?

Second, are there any plans to reorder?

Third, are we ensuring that none of these supplies will expire by the time they are used?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

We had to work very quickly to procure the low dead-volume syringes that are necessary to extract the maximum number of doses per vial. This was especially the case when Pfizer moved to six doses per vial. In very short order, the department worked quickly to procure 72.5 million low dead-volume syringes, and over 30 million of those have been delivered to provinces and territories to date.

I just want to emphasize how difficult it was to do that procurement. In a time when every country in the world was seeking that low dead-volume syringe, our department was able to put into place multiple contracts for the continued delivery of syringes.

In terms of the question relating to expiry that you had, I will ask Bill Matthews—

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Do we have enough?

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Ms. Vignola. That's the end of your six minutes. If the deputy minister can provide the information for that answer to the committee, that would be appreciated.

Now, Mr. Green, you have six minutes.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Minister, welcome back.

I want to begin by asking you if I understood you correctly in your opening remarks. You suggested that Moderna and Pfizer make up close to 84 million doses of vaccines in the bulk of our procurement delivery. Is that correct?