Thank you, Chair and the committee, for the invitation to speak here today.
The Canadian Association of PPE Manufacturers, CAPPEM, is made up of 30 Canadian controlled private corporations, SMEs, who answered the government's call to produce PPE here in Canada.
At the start of the pandemic, Canada had no N95 manufacturers, testing labs, or national standards. Canadian hospitals only bought N95s from multinationals that sourced from foreign countries. The N95s in the national emergency strategic stockpile had expired long ago, and most had been destroyed.
When the pandemic hit, China, Taiwan, and the U.S., banned exports of N95s, and the U.S. locked Canada out of NIOSH N95 certification. When the chips are down, we simply cannot rely on multinationals or foreign countries to protect our country. CAPPEM was created to ensure that Canada would never again be vulnerable to foreign countries and multinationals for the supply of PPEs.
When COVID hit, Canada was desperate for PPE, but the multinationals could not deliver. The government response was three-fold. One, compete in the world market to fly in billions of dollars of overpriced PPEs, 30% of which were found to be defective, counterfeit, or contaminated. Two, sole-sourced multi-year contracts and grants to the same two multinationals, 3M and Medicom, who could not deliver foreign N95s to Canada, when Canada needed them most. Three, a call to action to Canadian business to create a new domestic PPE industry.
SMEs make up 99% of the Canadian economy. They employ 90% of the private work force and 10 million Canadians. Canadian SMEs are the economic engine of Canada and we are here to help.
Today, we need your help. Medicom and 3M represent the 1%. Multinational manufacturers of foreign goods have been invited now by government to manufacture N95s here in Canada with plants bought and paid for by Canadian taxpayers. They were given sole-source contracts in the order of $600 million to sell N95s in competition against Canadian industry. This undermines the entire domestic Canadian PPE industry.
Despite promises made by the government to support the new PPE industry with flexible procurement, Canadian SMEs have been locked out of both federal and hospital contracts for almost two years now. Unless government reverses course, we will continue to be locked out for the next decade, and perhaps forever. The federal government says it no longer has an appetite for PPE procurement. In other words, there will be no contracts for Canadian industry. Over 100 Canadian SMEs answered the government call to action, and 70% of them are now out of the PPE business—many now bankrupt, and others on the way to bankruptcy.
The remaining CAPPEM SMEs, committed to a sustainable industry, can now produce 800 million high-quality N95s, two billion medical masks, and millions of reusable N95s every year. However, while Canadian industry is suffering from a lack of hospital contracts and promised government contracts, and now faces additional unfair competition from dumping and unfair labour practices, because the pandemic tariff exemption for PPEs has long outlived its usefulness.
SME innovation drives Canada’s economic growth. There’s been more innovation in Canadian PPEs in two years than in the previous 50 years worldwide. We’ve created new filter materials, new elastomeric N95s that look like cloth masks, and a new CSA national standard for N95s with the highest performance requirements in the world. We’ve also developed the world’s first industry standard for bioaerosol masks to protect the general public from virulent airborne disease.
There is no stockpile today of suitable bioaerosol masks intended for the public. We believe this is a major failing in emergency preparedness. Some 14 major variants of concern have already emerged, with no signs of stopping. We need to prepare for the very real possibility that some day we may face a highly virulent strain. Canada’s eight-week stockpile of N95s would be gone in eight days. We have nothing in our stockpile to provide to our eight million children.
A sustainable domestic PPE industry is absolutely the right thing for Canada. It has overwhelming public support, but it does not have the government support to make it a reality.
We were unprepared two years ago for a virulent airborne pandemic. We are still unprepared today. We heard testimony from PHAC that we are “now well situated...with N95 respirators, with domestic manufacturing in Canada.” I can assure you that we are not. We need to support our domestic PPE industry now, or it won’t be there when we need it.
Thank you.