I'd start by saying that a global pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 has not been seen in 100 years. We have many lessons for everyone in Canada and around the world from this pandemic. These lessons learned actually help us at the Government of Canada, in collaboration with provinces and territories, to adjust the approach.
We were very much in the realm of creating the national emergency stockpile, which was not equivalent to the scale of the pandemic we saw starting in 2020. We had done our assessment of what the national emergency stockpile policy was, as part of the optimization plan we were working on. We also were working with provinces and territories to look at the responsibility for information sharing for the details of things we were also putting together.
However, given the massive scale of pandemic, which actually took the whole world by surprise, the size of the strategic stockpile, which is supposed to be a backstop for the provinces' and territories' own stockpiles, was rather insufficient at the beginning. However, we pivoted immediately, with the help of our colleagues in the federal departments as well as provinces and territories and as was noted in the Auditor General's report, to quickly analyze the situation, procure and distribute very quickly so that we could actually support our frontline workers. As we have gone forward, we have further sharpened our policies and we have continued to work at pulling together the information that gives us a line of sight into future supply and demand. That will allow us to be better prepared should this kind of emergency ever present itself again.