Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair seems to be indicating that I have to answer quickly. Each province or territory has its own stockpile and should use it to try to meet its needs. When there is a very high demand that the provinces and territories can't meet, they must turn to the national emergency

Public Accounts committee  In my reference to short-term thinking, I look at all the work that we've done so far on the COVID response. I look at the response in the pandemic report that I issued in May as well as in this report here, and I see that many of the responses were reactive when dealing with H1N

Public Accounts committee  We did provide a recommendation there about how enforcing the terms of contracts is essential. The federal public service spends a lot of time making sure that there are good clauses in the contracts; enforcing them is essential. Here, the third party warehouses didn't always h

Public Accounts committee  All right. I will do my best. I would highlight just two things. One would be invoking the national security exception, which allows for non-competitive processes. The second would be accepting the risk of making advance payments in order to secure equipment to replenish the sto

Public Accounts committee  You raise one of the shortcomings we found in our audit, that the electronic inventory management system for the national emergency strategic stockpile was not effective. The government could not track the expiry dates of certain equipment stored in the Reserve Force and was ther

Public Accounts committee  Between January 30 and early March, the provinces and territories began making requests for equipment. As I mentioned in an earlier answer, the government attempted to meet these needs, but could not meet them fully. In early March, the government began a transition to mass proc

Public Accounts committee  There are advantages and disadvantages to doing real-time audits. One of the disadvantages is that individuals are very busy still trying to respond to the pandemic. Hence, we do need to make some difficult decisions about scoping and how far we dig on some issues. The biggest ad

Public Accounts committee  I'll try to answer that by talking about some of the long-standing issues in the two reports. I'll start with the first audit. In it, we looked at the Public Health Agency of Canada's management of the national emergency strategic stockpile and its response to the pandemic going

Public Accounts committee  I would point to two items I've noticed in this series of audits. When we looked at pandemic preparedness, I might have pointed to other matters, but here I would talk about the drive of short-term thinking, of dealing with the current things on the table versus that long-term vi

Public Accounts committee  It is difficult to demonstrate the impact in some areas. We don't know whether the response would have been different if the government had been better prepared. I can confirm that the requests for personal protective equipment made from February until mid-March, before the gov

Public Accounts committee  Perhaps I'll ask Mr. Goulet to add some detail. I know that we have determined the percentage of requests that were met. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, in February, one province requested over 500,000 masks, and I believe they received between 4% and 10% of the ma

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much for your comments. Yes, we will provide you with that information. We tried something different in these two audits: we did a real-time audit. We found shortcomings, and that certainly caused a slower response from the government. However, rather than waiting

Public Accounts committee  I am certainly concerned about that. These days, it seems like every report that I submit is about issues that have been around for a long time and that the government has not addressed. In our reports related to the pandemic, I have tried to strike a balance to show that the pub

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I am pleased to discuss our audit reports, which were tabled in the House of Commons on May 26. I am accompanied by Jean Goulet and Glenn Wheeler, the principals who were responsible for the audits. The first of the audit reports considers how the gover

Public Accounts committee  When we can, we always try to compare and discuss with other jurisdictions or other areas across the government. If the member would like, I could ask Joanna if she perhaps wants to elaborate on exactly how we went about doing that.