The government has undertake some short-term measures to try to stand up domestic supply chains, leveraging investment support programs, for example, to help companies retool and scale up production of PPE, but those are really short-term measures to deal with the short-term critical nature of the supply.
There needs to be a much longer-term strategy, and this isn't an overnight thing. You've mentioned that we've been talking about this for a long time. I've been before this committee several times in several different iterations over the years talking about this as well. It's critical that we have a big industrial strategy for Canada that includes skills and a made-in-Canada component. So much of it, though, is driven by technology, as Ms. Kusie was talking about earlier, and how we can improve our domestic competitiveness to be able to manufacture for any type of crisis in the future.
If we focus just on things like not having enough N95 masks for this crisis and how we can make more of them, what happens if the next crisis isn't about N95 masks? We need to have a domestic manufacturing capability that can respond to any crisis. We need better technology, we need more investment and we need more capability. Maybe more importantly than anything else, we need to understand what we make in Canada and what those companies can do.
The problem in standing up the domestic supply chain for the PPE was two-fold. First, we don't know what our capacities and capabilities are in manufacturing in the country; no one tracks that type of thing. We know roughly how many people work in chemical manufacturing or auto manufacturing, but knowing what type of chemicals and what they could be transitioned into is very different from knowing that these companies make chemicals in the first place, as an example. We need to understand that.
Second, we need to have much stronger procurement rules both in terms of buy Canada so that we're supporting domestic production and innovation, and second, that it be centralized and coordinated so that a company isn't supplying a local hospital if it is supplying, say, a regional, national or provincial health care network.