Public Accounts committee  Thank you for your comment on the report. We will certainly take it into account in our future reports. In order to ensure that the same mistakes don't happen again, many individuals must make an effort. That includes parliamentary committees and deputy ministers. In addition, our office must continue to follow up.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. I'll try to do it quickly and cover both reports, if I may. With regard to the Public Health Agency of Canada and Public Services and Procurement Canada with Health Canada, the agility and responsiveness that we saw there I would outline in four ways. There was a long-term national supply and demand model that was developed in order to determine the needs across the country.

Public Accounts committee  In the case of the Public Health Agency of Canada, as we mentioned in our audit, we felt that governance was something that was lacking in order to ensure good follow-up from their 2010 internal audit. An internal audit usually contains management responses. It is senior management.

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure I can speak to exactly what would have happened back in 2010 and 2013—

Public Accounts committee  I don't believe there was a decision to close the national emergency strategic stockpile. The decision was made to focus on being able to mobilize in a different way to respond to the surge in need—

Public Accounts committee  I would agree that they didn't respond to the needs, and from that perspective the national emergency strategic stockpile was not ready to support a pandemic.

Public Accounts committee  I'm sadly going to have to turn to Jean again to probably answer this, but I'm going to guess that the answer will be no, we didn't have reliable data. It would all have been contained in the same system, following the same mechanisms and processes. If you can't have reliable data on what was there and what those expiry dates are, chances are you don't have it as well on ins and outs.

Public Accounts committee  What we saw during the audit—and looking at the additional warehousing that was used in order to deal with the volume of mass purchasing that occurred—is that software was developed that would allow provinces and territories to have visibility on when personal protective equipment and medical devices were received in a warehouse and when they were ready to be shipped out to them.

Public Accounts committee  There are several options to better manage the reserve in the future. During our audit, there was some management of the reserve. Subsequently, there seems to have been less of a focus on it, and more of a focus on bulk procurement and seeking third-party support for inventory management because of the volume.

Public Accounts committee  Public Services and Procurement Canada's reaction was to accept more risk. There is a balance to be struck between risk management and the need to act quickly. The department did decide not to use certain processes in order to provide a faster response. It is also important to recognize that all procurement processes help to reduce risk, but never eliminate it completely.

Public Accounts committee  I'm going to have to turn to Jean again. I should have just let him keep going with the answers.

Public Accounts committee  I will eventually turn to Glenn Wheeler and see if he can add something about net new hires. What I can say is that the streamlining process Indigenous Services Canada applied during the pandemic to increase the number of nurses they could hire for those 51 remote communities where they're responsible for delivering health services was really effective.

Public Accounts committee  I'm going to ask Jean to add some of this granular level of detail that I'm not sure I have stored in my head. I'm going to see if Jean can answer that one.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that's correct. That was one of the issues identified in the 2010 internal audit by the agency. They identified that they needed to do that assessment of what should be in the stockpile and that the assessment had not been done. The evidence we found was that it had not been done because of budget limitations, so that was why they hadn't addressed it, and then you have nothing to compare it to, right?

Public Accounts committee  There were nine warehouses—