Mr. Speaker, at the end of October, I asked the government about its priorities for procurement when it came to Canada's COVID response over the past year. The Minister of Public Services and Procurement responded with no direct answers. She gave up a tremendous world salad, so I am hoping we can get a bit better salade du jour today from the minister.
The issues have been going on since the spring. When I was a member of the industry committee, we talked a lot about PPE and the government's response to the pandemic and how it was handling it. Repeatedly, there was talk and a lot of instances of business owners and manufacturers looking to retool what was going on in their companies so they could help out with the pandemic and the recovery.
Honey Bee Manufacturing is a company within my riding. I had the owners get in touch with the minister's office so they could repurpose and retool what they did to help with the pandemic. The response they got from the minister and her office staff was to thank them very much, that they really appreciated they were willing to help out, but at the time they did not need them. However, if they waited, the minister's staff might tell them later on if they needed them.
Then we have companies like Novo Textiles in B.C. The owner got a nice mention from the member for Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam. He gave a nice reference. The company had the capacity to manufacture masks and was not given any opportunity to expand production or to contribute even more than what they were able to already do.
We started to see incidents with companies like Medicom. It is involved in the medical world, but it had no production capacity in Canada to speak of. It got a government handout. Medicom was able to set up shop and develop masks. I am not begrudging Medicom for wanting to help out or the fact that it got the contract. However, the fact is that it had to build facilities to be able to start manufacturing its product. Companies that already had the capacity to do manufacturing were told that they were good where they were, that the government would give it to another company and wait for it to build up what it had.
Then we started to see somebody like Frank Baylis. It was the same thing. He did not have any capacity at that point in time to manufacture the very ventilator that he proposed and he got a massive contract. All he had to do was prove that he had connections through another company and prove that he was a Liberal, and he got a massive contract.
Canadians are looking for this process to once again bring manufacturing back to Canada. When Brad, a constituent in my riding, had to prove that he had the capacity to manufacture face shields, he did so but he did not get the contract, which is fine. However, now Brad is sitting with over $300,000 worth of product that is not being utilized.
Then we have all these companies which won the bid that are covered by a national security exemption for masks. I could understand it for vaccines, where there are sensitive scientific processes that go into it, but for plastic face shields? Why are we hiding behind national security exemptions for things like face shields or a simple face mask?