Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I reviewed your report on the Public Health Agency, Ms. Hogan. I saw it as a bit of a post-mortem of the federal government's management, at least in part, of the COVID-19 pandemic. As you're aware and as you outlined in your report, the Public Health Agency of Canada's national emergency strategic stockpile maintains the stockpile of medical supplies for public health emergencies, like pandemics. That's my understanding. It also works in conjunction with provincial stockpiles.
Your report gives what I would say is a resounding failing grade to the government's performance regarding emergency medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To summarize what you wrote, there is a significant and persistent weakness in the management of national emergency strategic stockpiles. You said that there are “gaps in its understanding of the types and quantities of medical supplies it needed” to respond to future public health emergencies. You also said that the Public Health Agency lacked “a strategy to manage excess and expired inventory” and in fact “wrote off” over 300 million dollars' worth of medical supplies that had expired or been damaged. Further, you said that the agency did not address “known deficiencies” in stockpile warehouses, including over 20 million dollars' worth of pharmaceuticals it had to throw out largely, from what I read, because of a cold storage problem they'd known about, as you outlined, for several years.
Finally, in your 2021 report on the procurement of PPE, you found that there were long-standing problems in stockpile management at the time. You outlined in this report that, since then, 14 actions have been set forth by the Public Health Agency, but only five have been implemented. There have been five small actions taken since the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic. That is my read.
From your reading of this, those five actions were not the most important actions that needed to be taken. Is that correct?