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 equipmen

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 m

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 re

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 wh

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

Public Accounts committee  No, we were unable to locate an assessment about that. We have been unable to find a national or even an international standard on basic levels that should be in stockpiles. It's fuelled by so many inputs. You need to understand your population. You need to understand what type o

Public Accounts committee  Unfortunately, I can't comment on what would have been in the provincial and territorial stockpiles.

Public Accounts committee  Okay.

Public Accounts committee  There were nine warehouses—

Public Accounts committee  There were nine warehouses that housed all of the equipment in the stockpile. I'm not sure that you can make the analogy that there were two million masks in each of the nine locations. There were nine warehouses that stored all of the equipment in the stockpile. As I mentioned

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure that I actually looked at the logistics of how they were distributed. Maybe Jean Goulet can add to some of that, but it really wasn't our focus. Our focus was on whether the stockpile was ready to respond and then on how the government responded, and how we can influ

Public Accounts committee  We haven't really looked at what the government has done for humanitarian purposes. However, I pointed out in my March report that the government did not have the necessary tools to more accurately determine the risk that COVID-19 posed to our country. Perhaps that explains the i

Public Accounts committee  We found at the beginning of the pandemic that there was a lot of confusion. There was a lack of information at the federal level about exactly what the provinces and territories needed and what they had in their own stockpiles. Each province or territory must use its own stockpi