Health committee  Thank you for the question. I am going to have to respond to this one in English. It's a little technical for me. Reagent is a chemical necessary for the traditional testing. The main source has been from one company in the past, and there's a global shortage, as the member mentioned, Mr.

Health committee  I think it's a bit of a mixed answer, Mr. Chair. PSPC is largely based in Canada. In our traditional procurement, we would be dealing with a Canadian supplier, who would be our interface with the manufacturer. As the member notes, she has a background in procurement, and in times of high demand you have to take a different approach.

Health committee  Partly, yes. We have the embassy, but then we supplement that with some third party expertise, people who do have that kind of expertise. On the ground in China, we are doing a few forms of vetting. Number one is vetting the company, the manufacturing facility itself, just in general.

Health committee  We are doing the testing in Canada now. When we started, we were doing it elsewhere. The testing is done in Canada. We are testing batches, so—

Health committee  Mr. Chair, the testing of the N95 masks is not being done in China right now. We are looking at ways to accelerate the testing to improve quality, but the feedback that we—

Health committee  I think that given the circumstances we're in right now, Mr. Chair, year-to-year is.... I don't want to say it's meaningless, but we are in a world where the volume is very far above what we're used to. We're dealing with companies that we've never had to deal with before, so—

Health committee  Obviously, vendors' performance and track records are very important to us, so we did reach out to the existing relationships we had and grab things off the shelves. Performance is critical. Maybe I'll stop there, Mr. Chair.

Health committee  There are a couple of aspects to this. It's quite accurate in terms of the quantity that was received and deemed unusable. I'll come back to that in a moment. There is a long-term order in place with a well-known supplier, a provider of swabs. That is a key order for us in terms of ongoing fulfillment.

Health committee  I can only speak to my experience in dealing with existing Canadian suppliers, as well as those looking to emerge into the markets. It has not been something that has been raised with me one bit, and that's both through interaction on our website in looking for supply as well as in our interactions with ISED in terms of tooling up the domestic industry.

Health committee  It's part of the outcome. They run their models and then they place orders. As I mentioned earlier, some of those orders are very large. The orders they place with us would be the outcome of their planning. I mentioned that the last one we received was, I believe, for 80 million masks over a long period of time.

Health committee  We certainly have an ongoing discussion about supply lines and the time it takes. We're very well plugged in to our plans around domestic capacity with ISED and how long it might take for that to come online. I think it's twofold. One is the long-term orders. Then, as I mentioned earlier, if any kind of immediate, unforecast urgency pops up in a province or territory, they will get on the phone with us urgently to say, “Can you get us something ASAP?”

Health committee  We would place orders for the government writ large, so we have a number of departments, including PHAC, that we would have a regular dialogue with in terms of orders. I will turn to Arianne for a second to see if her memory is better than mine on pre-COVID orders, but I'd encourage you to think beyond PHAC.

Health committee  Certainly there has, and as mentioned earlier, this involves a great deal of leadership from our colleagues at ISED, the Department of Industry, in assessing a company's ability to scale up quickly, because speed is important here, and then what their ability to participate as a long-term player is in the various fields?

Health committee  Certainly, I can. There are two basic pieces. They are very obvious, but these are important for people. There is the procurement itself, and then once the goods arrive there is the logistics solution to distribute them. The system we have in place is that the Public Health Agency is managing the distribution.

Health committee  In terms of the last 10 years, I cannot answer that, but I'm sure we can easily undertake to get back to the committee on that. Before I say that, I should ask my colleagues if they happen to know. I suspect their answer is the same as mine. Hearing silence, we'll get back to you.