The Canadian government spent $120 million chartering cargo flights to ship personal protective equipment (PPE) from China in the first 90 days of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Documents obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter through an Access to Information request show that federal agencies had to charter planes after failing to maintain a national stockpile of masks, gloves, and medical gowns.
A June 10, 2020 staff memo in the Department of Public Works detailed the millions of dollars spent on cargo fees to fly emergency shipments of PPE from suppliers in China. Contracts included $15 million each to Air Canada, WestJet, First Air, and PAL Aerospace, and $60 million to Cargojet of Hamilton, Ont.
“The cost of flying one cargo plane from China to Canada is between $600,000 and $800,000,” said a staff email in the Prime Minister’s Office, dated April 1, 2020.
Mismanagement
A few months earlier in February, the foreign affairs department had announced that it had donated 16 tonnes of PPE to China, where the coronavirus was first reported to appear. That decision came after the World Health Organization declared the disease should be considered a “public health emergency of international concern” and urged countries to enhance preparation.PPE deliveries from China also faced many disruptions at the time, resulting in several cargo flights that Canada had deployed to retrieve the medical supplies to return empty.
When asked about the missing medical goods from China and its impact on Canadian supply chains, then-Department of Public Works Deputy Minister Bill Matthews told a parliamentary committee “there’s certainly a risk.”
“If we were in a normal environment, we would be looking to our suppliers to basically transport the goods to Canada themselves, but that was proving to be an overly risky endeavour, given the environments on the global stage and competition for goods. We have made the adjustments on the ground in China to properly secure out product.”
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has acknowledged mismanaging the national stockpile of emergency pandemic supplies, though to date it has not explained why it was caught short at the outbreak of the pandemic despite repeated warnings to keep a minimum of six months’ supply of PPE, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
“In many ways, the NESS [emergency stockpile system] is an insurance policy,” PHAC auditors wrote in a 2011 report, titled Evaluation of the National Emergency Stockpile System.
“No one ever wants to draw from that insurance policy because that would mean an undesirable event has happened and many people are affected,” the report said. “However, these types of events will continue to happen, and Canada has to be prepared. There is a need for a stockpile of public health supplies managed by the federal government.”
The NESS report was prompted by the 2009 H1N1 pandemic that killed 428 Canadians and hospitalized 8,678 others.
In a separate 2006 plan, PHAC said future pandemics were “inevitable” and that Canada must be prepared.
“The novel virus will be transmitted efficiently from person to person resulting in large numbers of people being infected.”
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