Government Operations Committee on June 7th, 2021

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

So it remains to be seen.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Ms. Vignola. I gave you 10 of the 20 seconds that Mr. Drouin had left.

We'll go to Mr. Green, for six minutes.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

As always, it's a pleasure to have the Auditor General before this committee.

I often talk about how there's a bit of a blur between public accounts and OGGO. However, public accounts was fortunate to receive a response with respect to Ms. Hogan's appearance before the public accounts committee on June 1 which discussed the report we're dealing with today regarding the government's preparedness and responsiveness to COVID. In that committee, I raised some questions, as did my colleague Mr. Berthold, about the responsiveness and preparedness of the government in the months leading up to COVID. We have seen in this report—and it's often talked about—the government's response on the bulk procurement of critical and lifesaving PPE.

Through you, Mr. Chair, to Ms. Hogan, our Auditor General, in your response based on your audit period, you referenced the 56 requests for assistance to the national emergency strategic stockpile. These requests included PPE and medical devices and are within the scope of your audit. You released a table that shows the types of personal protective equipment and medical devices that the provinces and territories requested. I have access to this by way of its being posted on public accounts. I'll share it with this committee. I'll run down it.

There were close to seven million medical gowns requested but only 790 were shipped, so only about 12% were received. There were 3,261,935 N95 masks requested but only 130,380 were shipped, which is about 4%. There were 45,000 test swabs requested by the provinces and only 20,700 were delivered, a 46% success rate. With respect to ventilators, it is listed by the Auditor General that 538 ventilators were requested by the provinces and only 96 were shipped, a success rate of about 18% on the shipping.

Is it safe to say that in its response to the provinces, the federal government shipped everything it had in the national emergency strategic stockpile to the provinces?

[Karen Hogan]

Thank you very much for the question.

I would like to let the member know that I also shared that letter with the chair of this committee this morning so that everyone here could get a copy of it. I felt it was relevant to our hearing today.

You're referring to the table we looked at during our audit period, so the requests received between February and August of 2020. Unfortunately, I can't tell you whether everything that was shipped was in the national emergency strategic stockpile at that time, for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned, I don't believe we can rely on the data as to what was in there. However, the stockpile was also used at times to provide equipment to federal organizations. It wasn't necessarily the entirety of what was in there.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Based on the charts in terms of understanding what the roles and responsibilities are, through you, Mr. Chair, for the national emergency strategic stockpile, I'm to understand, and perhaps Ms. Hogan can confirm, that it is the federal government's responsibility to provide in this way. Coming out of SARS and H1N1, were we to have the ability, distributed across the country, to respond to pandemics like this based on the framework for the national emergency strategic stockpile, and is that that where our responsibility ends? Was it up to the provinces to access this?

I guess if we know that the percentages of requested units shipped were 12%, 4%, 46% and 18%, is it safe to say, based on the previous answer, that either the government was withholding critical ventilators and N95 masks or they simply didn't have them? In the Auditor General's opinion, which would be the case?

[Karen Hogan]

In my opinion, it was clear that the national emergency strategic stockpile was not ready to respond to a pandemic.

I do want to provide a bit of the nuance of the purpose of the stockpile. It's to deal with surge capacity. Each province and territory manages health care, which includes managing and having their own stockpile of personal protective equipment. It's when they don't have any left there and they need more that they turn to that.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Respectfully, Mr. Chair, I need to reclaim my time on this.

You'll recall that this government threw out two million N95 masks in 2019 in the lead-up to this. At some point in time, it was deemed necessary to have millions of critical PPE for surge. Now we're talking about a response on the N95s, a 4% successful shipping rate out to the provinces on the eve of a global catastrophic pandemic.

This is my final question. In your opinion, would you not agree that the national emergency strategic stockpile was a catastrophic failure on the eve of COVID?

[Karen Hogan]

I would agree that the national emergency strategic stockpile was not ready for this pandemic. One of those long-standing issues that the Public Health Agency had not addressed was doing a needs assessment to establish that baseline threshold that should have been in the stockpile in order to be prepared for a pandemic.

I encourage you to ask the departmental officials these questions when they appear after us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Ms. Hogan, and thank you, Mr. Green.

There goes the other 10 seconds of Mr. Drouin.

We'll now start the second round and we will start with Mr. McCauley for five minutes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Hogan, welcome back.

You talked about surge capacity, that the strategic stockpile was designed for surge capacity. What numbers would have had to be in the stockpile to cover what you consider surge capacity?

[Karen Hogan]

I unfortunately don't have the knowledge or the data to be able to come up with that. That's something the federal government was supposed to do following its response and lessons learned from H1N1 and SARS.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Right. The reason I ask that and Mr. Green actually brought it up or you started bringing it up is we heard the Minister of Health repeatedly say both in this committee and the House that it wasn't the role of the stockpile to provide for the provinces. But you're saying it was to provide for surge capacity. I'm trying to figure out what its true role was and what actual numbers they should have had.

As a follow-up question, what was the effect of their ability to handle the surge considering they closed down warehouses and threw out so much PPE? Also, we donated a fair amount to the Government of China. I'm just trying to figure out the roles each of those played in, what I think Mr. Green called a catastrophic failure, but perhaps in memory of Mr. Ferguson, we'll call it an incomprehensible failure.

[Karen Hogan]

All I can tell you is what we were able to review in documents and in talking with officials of the purpose of the national emergency strategic stockpile. It's meant to be sort of the last line of defence after provinces and territories have tried to purchase their own and have looked at their own stockpile. I believe there's even an agreement that provinces and territories can help each other out if needed, and then the national emergency strategic stockpile is there to help deal with that surge.

I think it was clear it was not ready for this pandemic.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Do you think they're clear now on what they have to do?

I'm going to quote what the Minister of Health said in committee. She said that the stockpile “was never meant to accumulate personal protective equipment but rather other kinds of treatments for all kinds of biological events”.

Here we have the health minister saying it wasn't meant to hold PPE. We have PHAC throwing out PPE and you're saying it's meant to provide surge capacity for PPE. Are you comfortable with PHAC's response to your response that they're going to get their act together?

[Karen Hogan]

I believe that the Public Health Agency has committed to learn and to take action, so to learn that what happened—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Committed to learn doesn't mean they're going to get it done. Do you think they're going to get it done?

This leads into another question. The rest of the responses from the government are “ We agree. We agree.” Do you see metrics to their responses besides just saying, “We agree with the Auditor's assessment”?

[Karen Hogan]

What we saw during the pandemic was that they didn't keep going with the way they were going. Requests for assistance, which were how the provinces and territories could access the stockpile, stopped and they moved to bulk procurement.

I do think you should be asking the Public Health Agency whether or not it's going to address long-standing issues.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Given the responses in your report, are you satisfied with what the government...? Do you have a sense of confidence in the government's response regarding how they're going to handle your recommendations?

Again, apart from PHAC saying that a year down the road, after the pandemic, it will get around to doing the study, I don't see a lot of metrics in their other responses. We've seen that unless you have metrics to measure things by, things do not get done. Are you satisfied with the responses?

[Karen Hogan]

We asked the Public Health Agency and the other departments to provide metrics in their responses. I trust they'll do that in their detailed action plans. I know the public accounts committee will ask for a detailed action plan when it studies this report.

What I can tell you is that I am frustrated with the fact that the government has not been acting on known issues. I've tabled 11 reports since February and in many instances that is my finding. I'm on the eve of my first year as Auditor General, and I hope that I won't be repeating these messages for the next nine years of my mandate. They should take action.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I sincerely hope so. I know when Mr. Ferguson was presenting a report about Northern Affairs doctoring reports on graduations of indigenous people, he said it had been going on for close to a decade with no action. Hopefully, we will see some response to this. Thanks for your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. McCauley.

We'll now go to Mr. Weiler for five minutes.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank the Auditor General and all the witnesses for joining our committee meeting today, and importantly for the work that's being done to ensure that we can learn from and continually improve how we do PPE processes, particularly in the context of a global health emergency response.

In the report you note that various departments appear to have taken away some lessons learned from past projects and introduced some new and more agile procurement practices. I was hoping you could be specific on what that means in terms of actions that have actually been taken.

[Karen Hogan]

Thank you for your kind words. We work very hard and hope we deliver reports that provide value to the government and Canadians.

In the report on PPE, I note where we saw the government be agile and react, and I will highlight four ways for you.

One was the development of a long-term national supply and demand model, which did not exist before. It helps determine the needs across the entire country.

Then the Public Health Agency moved to bulk procurement, which was led by Public Services and Procurement Canada, to procure large volumes in very competitive markets, where supply often didn't keep up with demand, at least at the beginning of the pandemic for sure.

The third item we noticed was the outsourcing of warehousing and logistical capacity to deal with the big increase in demand, which allowed the federal government to get equipment to the provinces and territories quicker.

Finally, we saw the Public Health Agency collaborate with the provinces and territories to agree on a scarce resource allocation strategy. When purchasing could not keep up with the demand, how would the equipment received be distributed to all the provinces and territories in an equitable manner?

All of those were great, but they were very reactive. What we hope the government learns is that now we have to maintain those, build on them and not be so reactive during the next health crisis.

[Patrick Weiler, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

I'll follow up on that. Obviously these are new approaches that are being taken. How do you want the implementation of some of those lessons learned to be carried forward consistently into the future? Do you see a lot of those measures as more of just an emergency response or ones you want to be done proactively?

[Karen Hogan]

I think a few of them are for emergency response. Being reactive is very tiring and difficult. The scarce resource allocation strategy is one that I think has a bit more of a long-term life to it, as well as the long-term supply and demand model.

What I hope the departments will do is act on the three main issues they have known for about a decade. One, they need to come up with a needs assessment of what should be in a stockpile for a health crisis. Two, they need to deal with their data quality issues and replace the IT system that supports the national emergency strategic stockpile because it's a critical in a crisis. Finally, they need to make sure they have the resources, which includes the right budget, to deal with all of the actions they need to take to better prepare the government for the next crisis.