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The great PPE panic: How the pandemic caught Canada with its stockpiles down – CBC.ca

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This is the fourth in a series of articles looking at some of the lessons learned from the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and how Canada moves forward.

To hear Minister of Public Services and Procurement Anita Anand describe it, Canada’s effort to supply frontline workers during the pandemic has been a significant — if uneven — success.

“We did procurement like it has never been done before,” said Minister of Public Services and Procurement Anita Anand. “We are in an urgent scramble to secure personal protective equipment and we will not let up until that task is accomplished.”

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The federal government, she said, has conducted just under a hundred flights to Canada carrying Chinese personal protective equipment (PPE) and bringing supplies from the U.S. and Europe.

It was a remarkable, last-ditch effort. But could it have been avoided?

Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand listens to a question during a news conference in Ottawa, April 16, 2020. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Dr. Sandy Buchman, president of the Canadian Medical Association, gives Ottawa credit for pulling every lever it could when the need for PPE became critical. “But they wouldn’t have had to scramble to do that if we had adequate stockpiles, and the same goes for medication,” he told CBC News. “We should have maintained and had them available.

“We had a pandemic plan in place but we didn’t actually have things ready. We didn’t have adequate personal protective equipment for frontline health care workers.”

In fact, Canada still doesn’t have the PPE it needs to keep those essential workers safe.

Read more from the series:

Just take a look at the nation’s capital. Thirty out of some 600 Ottawa paramedics are currently reassigned from front-line duties because of a lack of N95 masks, according to their union.

CUPE ambulance rep Jason Fraser told CBC News that when he began as a paramedic during the SARS epidemic in 2003, he and his co-workers were fitted out with state-of-the-art respirators. 

“For 17 years, the gold standard of mask has been the N95 masks,” he said. “And due to a global shortage or difficulty obtaining proper PPE, all of a sudden surgical masks are OK protection.”

Fraser said his members don’t want to work with anything less than N95s and don’t believe they’d be asked to do so were it not for preventable shortages.

He points the finger of blame mainly at the Ontario government. But a shortage of N95s has been an issue in many places across the country.

PPE stock in poor shape

Canada’s pandemic response got off to a rocky start when it came to the basic tools: masks, gowns, gloves and other products.

Canadian PPE stockpile levels were woefully low when the pandemic hit; materials were allowed to expire without being used or even donated, and then ended up in landfills. The Trudeau government was widely criticized for sending 16 tons of PPE to China at a time when the novel coronavirus was still mostly a Chinese problem, and the Public Health Agency of Canada was still mistakenly assessing the risk to Canadians as “low.”

A cargo aircraft delivers medical supplies and protective equipment to Montréal–Mirabel International Airport. (Daniel Thomas/Radio-Canada)

Anand said her department responded to those shortages by fostering the creation of a Canadian PPE industry from scratch.

“Forty-four per cent of our contracts by dollar value are made with domestic manufacturers,” she said.

“This is an incredible effort on behalf of Canadians themselves to protect Canadians. So that is a heartening story and it’s also an important lesson learned.”

It’s a lesson nearly everyone involved in fighting the pandemic agrees has to be learned — if Canada wants to avoid the same experience when the next pandemic hits.

The preppers weren’t prepared

One nation that hasn’t had to worry about PPE is Finland. Its history of Soviet invasion left it with a siege mentality that manifested itself in the construction of a secret network of bunkers stocked with supplies to carry its people through times of war or disaster — including a huge stockpile of masks.

Canada also has a National Emergency Stockpile System (NESS), launched in 1952 at the height of the Cold War and originally intended to help Canada survive a nuclear attack.

Lately, the system’s rationale has changed somewhat. “We began to move away from beds and blankets and increased our holdings of antiviral medications and key treatments,” Sally Thornton of the Public Health Agency of Canada told MPs at a committee hearing in May.

“We do not focus on PPE and that wouldn’t be a major element, because we count on our provinces, within their respective authority, to maintain their stockpile.”

Some MPs found that answer highly unsatisfactory, given that the NESS last year threw out two million N95 masks that had been allowed to expire.

Stockpile ‘completely unready’

“The stockpile system proved completely unready for COVID-19, and the degree of unreadiness goes well beyond the explanation that COVID-19 was was unexpected in terms of its impact and scale,” said Wesley Wark of the University of Ottawa, an intelligence expert who studied the NESS’s response to the pandemic.

“It was clearly underfunded. Cabinet ministers and senior officials have admitted that fact.”

Health Minister Patty Hajdu said in April that “federal governments for decades have been underfunding things like public health preparedness, and I would say that obviously governments all across the world are in the same exact situation.”

Inventory analyst Olivia Ivey organizes a stack of boxed personal protective equipment inside the massive warehouse in Langley, B.C. where the Provincial Health Services Authority receives and distributes millions of pieces of PPE. (Glen Kugelstadt/CBC)

What Hajdu said is true — although her own government closed warehouses and left the stockpile even smaller than it found it. NESS’s annual budget is only about $3 million and both the Harper and Trudeau governments routinely spent even less on it. It has a regular staff of just 18 people.

“But beyond its underfunding,” said Wark, “it basically lacked any kind of strategy as far as I can tell to prepare for an emergency …”

“There was really no planning done to integrate the federal government’s stockpile system with those held by the provinces and territories. It’s not until February — a month into the COVID-19 crisis — [that] the federal government wakes up to the fact that they don’t even know what is held in provincial and territorial stockpiles, nor do provinces and territories know what’s held in the federal stockpile. That points to a basic strategic failure.”

The come-as-you-are pandemic

When March arrived, Wark said, “the stockpile system had to transition into being a kind of portal for trying to get supplies hastily mobilized from domestic suppliers or international sources into Canada and passed on to provinces and territories.

“You know, I think the whole thing was just a desperate scramble. And it didn’t need to have been that way, if proper attention had been paid to the important role that the stockpile system was meant to play.”

A pandemic is a bad time to start shopping for emergency supplies. With COVID-19 engulfing one country after another, Canada found itself competing with dozens of other countries, as well as private U.S. hospital networks, to acquire the most sought-after items. 

Anand said the government has learned that lesson and will ensure that stockpiles of PPE, medicines and other essentials are maintained in future.

Stockpiles alone won’t solve the problem, she said, because PPE products have expiry dates and a major pandemic would at least start to exhaust any stockpile.

“Another part of the puzzle is also to make sure that we’ve got relationships with a diverse range of suppliers who can produce these goods so that we have priority when it comes to making sure that we have that product,” she said.

Unreliable suppliers

Canada’s two main markets for acquiring PPE supplies — the U.S. and China — have been problematic.

China’s PPE market quickly flooded with new companies that previously had been making things like baby toys or auto parts. They began to churn out PPE of wildly varying quality.

In the U.S., President Donald Trump ordered 3M to stop fulfilling contracts to provide N95 masks to other countries, and halted a shipment to Ontario in April. Thanks mainly to dogged resistance to that order by 3M executives, the threat was averted.

Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, holds a 3M N95 mask as she and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence visit 3M headquarters in Maplewood, Minn., March 5, 2020. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP)

But it it all served as a reminder of the risks involved in depending on other countries for essential supplies in a global emergency. Ontario Premier Doug Ford vowed to make his province self-sufficient.

“I’m not going to rely on President Trump,” he said. “I’m not going to rely on any prime minister of any country ever again. Our manufacturing, we’re gearing up and once they start, we’re never going to stop them.”

Anand said she is working to end Canada’s dependence on foreign sources. 

“The strategy from procurement has been to diversify our supply chains to make sure that we are not reliant on one country or one jurisdiction alone,” she said.

“We would very much aim to have domestic production of every item here in Canada.”

That would mean persuading the Canadian manufacturers that switched production over to medical equipment — such as clothing maker Stanfields in Nova Scotia — to stay in the game once the crisis passes.

Mixed messages on masks

The government’s early advice against wearing masks confused many Canadians, who suspected (correctly, as it turned out) that the guidance defied common sense.

That confusion also affected people in the medical field.

“I have been astounded that we are not being told to wear masks,” one occupational therapist told CBC News on March 31, describing conditions at the rehab hospital where she worked. “We are even being told we can’t wear our own masks and will be reprimanded and potentially disciplined for doing so.”

Some Canadian hospitals even had security guards order people to remove masks before they could enter.

A B.C. Ambulance Service paramedic wearing a face shield, an N95 mask and gloves is seen in the ambulance bay outside the emergency department at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, B.C., April 12, 2020. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)

Calgary ER physician Joe Vipond told CBC News the government’s position on masks struck him as irrational from the beginning.

“And I see that changing, but boy it’s slow!” he said.

He said that his own province of Alberta was “pretty late to the PPE bandwagon”.

“I know in B.C. on March 25 every single hospital and every single long term care facility were mandated to wear masks in all situations, in order to avoid pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic spread,” he said.

In Alberta, he added, that decision came “a good three weeks after. And so I think a lot of ways we were quite lucky to avoid a lot of transmission within our acute care facilities. That didn’t work out so well for our long term care facilities.

“I know there was one outbreak at the Lloydminster hospital and also in Winnipeg that were blamed on lack of universal masking. There was always a concern about N95, and we were told to be very cautious in our use.”

Vipond blamed the relentless search for cost efficiencies, cheaper vendors and just-in-time delivery for the shortages.

“There is value in having stockpiles and there is value in having your own domestic control over things,” he said. “I’m hoping that we recognize the value of being a masters of our own domain.”

Mike Villenueve, CEO of the Canadian Nurses’ Association, agrees with Vipond about the patchwork nature of PPE access across the country.

“It’s been a story of great success in many places … and the complete opposite in others — you can’t seem to get it, or it’s locked up, or I’m encouraged to not use it because it’s expensive,” he said.

“Our view is that we should err on the side of protecting people, and whatever the cost of an N95 mask is, [it’s] small compared to the cost of a life.”

‘A sense of mistrust’

Villeneuve said the fact that rules on PPE use varied from place to place led nurses to suspect PPE policies were being driven not by the best science but by harsh realities of supply and shortage.

“How come that filters down so differently across 13 jurisdictions, hundreds of employers and different practice settings and so on, when a nurse in a practice setting in Alberta is doing the same thing as a nurse in the same setting in Manitoba?” he said.

“That sort of sets up a sense of mistrust.”

Anand said that it’s up to provinces to set such policies — but she doesn’t rule out the federal government making uniform recommendations. 

She said her department soon will be rolling out new PPE supplier competitions on its supply hub website.

“We have had 26,000 businesses respond to our call out to suppliers, 26,000 businesses wanting to step up and assist in the Team Canada effort,” she said. And while only about 17,000 of those companies are Canadian, Anand argued it “suggests is that there is capacity in the Canadian economy to become self-sufficient in the area of PPE.”

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Child care in Canada: Trudeau unveils new help for providers – CTV News

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The federal government is launching a new loan program to help child-care providers in Canada expand their spaces, and will be extending further student loan forgiveness and training options for early childhood educators, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.

The prime minister unveiled a trio of child-care-centric commitments that will be included in the upcoming federal budget, with the aim of opening up more $10-a-day child-care spaces across the country, as the Liberals continue to work towards creating 250,000 new spaces by March 2026.

Specifically, the Liberals are vowing to offer $1 billion in low-cost loans and $60 million in non-repayable grants to public and not-for-profit child-care providers, so they can build or renovate their care centres. 

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This funding will be administered through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMCH), which Trudeau called “a common sense approach that will help child care be developed alongside housing.”

An additional $48 million is being earmarked for the next four years to extend student loan forgiveness — similar to the program offered to rural doctors and nurses — to early childhood educators, in an effort to incentivize more teachers to work in smaller communities. 

The federal government is also promising $10 million over the next two years to train more early childhood educators.

The prime minister, speaking in Surrey, B.C., alongside the minister currently leading the file, Jenna Sudds, touted the bilateral child-care agreements in effect across the country for seeing thousands of children placed in affordable spaces.

However, in recent months Canadian parents and care providers have sounded alarms about increasingly long daycare waitlists. And, operators in some provinces have threatened to withdraw from the lower-cost program because they’re struggling to make ends meet. 

Trudeau said while the government has funded 100,000 spaces so far and is aware of the challenges in rolling out this new national program, not enough families have access and not all provinces are moving as fast as they should. 

“I want to take a moment to talk to young moms, many of you millennials. You’ve grown up with so many pressures in this economy, the 2008 recession, COVID, climate change … and we want to make sure that everyone — especially moms raising kids — has the best chance to succeed and thrive,” Trudeau said.

“As Canada grows, as families grow, we want to make sure more kids can access high-quality child care… That’s what fairness for every generation is all about.”

The prime minister also got political, accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of opposing the program, despite the Official Opposition voting in support of a recently passed Liberal piece of legislation meant to enshrine in law a commitment to the Canada-wide early learning and child-care system, and the long-term funding needed to maintain it. 

Reacting to the news, NDP MP and critic for children, families, and social development Leah Gazan said the announcement was a “direct result of advocacy” by her party, care workers, unions, and women’s organizations.

She also pointed the finger at the Conservatives, accusing them of trying to stall the program and push for a “for-profit private system that parents can’t afford.” 

Liberal pre-budget strategy

Similar to how Wednesday’s rollout of renter-fairness-focused pre-budget news went, cabinet ministers are making echo announcements of the new child-care affordability measures across the country Thursday afternoon. 

This is all part of a new communications strategy the Liberals are employing in the lead up to the release of the April 16 federal budget.

Practically every day between now and when Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland releases the massive economic document, the Liberals are expected to tease out bits and pieces of the budget.

In an effort to stretch out their ability to market the measures within it, Trudeau as well as members of his cabinet will unveil new initiatives over the next two weeks, to the point that the vast majority of the budget will be public prior to budget day.

Traditionally, governments have held budget news — save for some pre-tabling leaks — for the day the document is tabled in the House of Commons post-daylong reporter and stakeholder lockup.

Kicking off this strategy on Wednesday, Trudeau issued a video across social media platforms indicating the overall theme for the 2024 budget will be “generational fairness,” a message meant to speak to millennials and Generation Z.

“When I first decided to run for office, one of my biggest motivations was working to create a Canada that young people saw themselves… As prime minister, I’ve never lost sight of that,” Trudeau said in the clip.

“You as a young Canadian are the heartbeat of our economy. You power our growth and you deserve an economy that gives you a fair shot at success. But, this moment we’re all living in is throwing big challenges your way… So we’re going to roll up our sleeves and work like hell. And we’re going to tell you about what we’re doing to fix it, over the next two weeks.”

While Trudeau’s 2015 election victory was credited in part to a historic surge in young people turning up at the polls, Poilievre has been chipping away at that Liberal voting bloc of those aged 43 and under, seeking to appeal to their current struggles to get ahead with his “powerful paycheques” and housing affordability arguments.

In November 2023, Trudeau tapped Max Valiquette, a marketing guru with self-described expertise in understanding younger generations, as his new executive director of communications.

“We’re witnessing a different communication strategy from the government. They’re implementing something they’ve not tried before. We’re not going to have a budget day on April 16. We’re going to have budget days between now and April 16,” said political commentator Scott Reid in an interview on CTV News Channel.

“Frankly, this government knows that it needs to break through, it knows that it needs to connect with Canadians… Is it going to turn around the polls overnight? No. Might they get a little bit more of a hearing than they otherwise would have been? Probably.” 

With files from CTV News’ Vassy Kapelos and Annie Bergeron-Oliver

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Ontario releases 2023 Sunshine List, top earner made $1.9M – CBC.ca

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Five employees at Ontario Power Generation are in the top 10 earners on the province’s so-called sunshine list for 2023, with the province’s highest salary nearing $2 million.

The annual sunshine list documents public sector employees with salaries over $100,000. In this year’s edition, there are 300,570 names, more than 30,000 higher than last year.

Kenneth Hartwick, CEO of the electricity Crown corporation, is in the top spot again with a salary of $1.93 million.

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Two other executives at the organization — chief strategy officer Dominique Miniere and chief projects officer Michael Martelli — made nearly $1.2 million and nearly $1 million, respectively.

You can find a list of the top 100 earners below.

The presidents and CEOs of the Hospital for Sick Children and the University Health Network are also in the top 10, earning around $850,000 each. So is Phil Verster, who is president and CEO of the provincial transit agency, Metrolinx, with a $838,097 salary.

Caroline Mulroney, president of the Treasury Board, highlighted other high growth areas in a release.

“The largest year-over-year increases were in the hospitals, municipalities and services, and post-secondary sectors, which together represented approximately 80 per cent of the growth of the list,” she said.

The list shows 17 professors or associate professors at the University of Toronto had earnings of $500,000 or more.

A statement from a University of Toronto spokesperson said the school competes with top universities and private-sector employers around the world for faculty members.

“This occasionally results in salaries above the usual range for a small number of faculty members.”

An Ontario Power Generation building.
Five employees at Ontario Power Generation are among the top 10 spots of the annual sunshine list for 2023. (Cole Burston/The Canadian Press)

Premier Doug Ford earned $208,974 last year. His chief of staff, Patrick Sackville, earned $324,675.

Matthew Anderson, CEO of Ontario Health, a provincial agency the Ford government created in 2019, earned $821,000. Meanwhile the public servant leading the Ministry of Health, deputy minister Catherine Zahn, earned $477,360, and Health Minister Sylvia Jones, $165,851.

There are more than 25,000 registered nurses on the list, including seven who earned more than $300,000 last year.

Chief Justice Sharon Nicklas, who was appointed to the top post in the province’s judiciary last May, earned $388,960.

The police chiefs of Thunder Bay, Daniel Taddeo, ($376,428) and Hamilton, Francis Bergen, ($374,492) were paid more last year than OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique ($373,472). Taddeo retired in April 2023. 

Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw, who took over the post in late 2022, earned $353,411. 

Organizations that receive provincial government funding are also required to disclose salaries for the sunshine list, so it includes top earners at some registered charities.

The chief executive of the True Patriot Love Foundation, Nicholas Booth, earned $421,149. The foundation funds support programs for veterans and military families. 

The president and CEO of the Canadian Red Cross Society, Conrad Sauve, earned $412,970, while the YMCA of Greater Toronto’s chief executive, Medhat Mahdy, earned $394,057.

Salaries of other key Ontario public figures include:

  • $826,539 for Ontario Pension Board CEO Mark Fuller.
  • $709,581 for Ontario Lottery and Gaming Association president & CEO Alfred Hannay.
  • $601,376 for Registered Nurses Association of Ontario CEO Doris Grinspun.
  • $596,392 for Dean of Ivey Business School, Western University, Sharon Hodgson.
  • $563,291 for LCBO president & CEO George Soleas.
  • $546,053 for Dean of the Faculty of Health Science, Queen’s University, Jane Philpott.
  • $533,112 for Royal Ontario Museum president & CEO Joshua Basseches.
  • $486,192 for University of Toronto president Meric Gertler.
  • $464,148 for Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore.
  • $455,091 for Chief Coroner Dr. Dirk Huyer.
  • $404,003 Art Gallery of Ontario director and CEO Stephan Jost.
  • $395,974 for former auditor general Bonnie Lysyk.

Adjusting sunshine list threshold

The sunshine list has been around for almost 30 years, always set at six figures and up. 

At Queen’s Park on Thursday, some members of provincial Parliament faced questions on whether the $100,000 starting point should be adjusted.

Green Party of Ontario Leader Mike Schreiner said it should be pegged to the rate of inflation, but others disagreed.

“I think that people think that $100,000 is still a lot of money, especially in an affordability crisis,” said NDP MPP Catherine Fife, who’s also the finance critic.

Government House Leader Paul Calandra said the government has no plans at this time to change the threshold on the sunshine list.

“I think it’s an important document that serves the people well in highlighting the salaries of our public employees.”

The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, enacted by former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris in 1996, compels organizations that receive public funding from the province to report the names, positions and pay of people who make more than $100,000.

The interactive chart below shows the top 100 earners on the list, based on both salary and benefits.

Search the complete Sunshine List for yourself here.

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1 dead, 2 critically injured after car crash in Montreal

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Montreal

Three people are in hospital with critical injuries after their vehicle crashed into a tree. Police believe they might be connected to two drive-by shootings that took place early Thursday morning.

2 drive-by shootings also took place overnight

an SPVM car near a taped-off crime scene
Montreal police are investigating a car crash possibly linked to two drive-by shootings. (Mathieu Wagner/Radio-Canada)

Urgences-santé say one person died and two others were critically injured after their vehicle hit a tree in the Rosemont neighbourhood.

Montreal police believe the crash may be linked to two drive-by shootings early Thursday morning.

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The first happened around 5 a.m. on Pie-IX Boulevard. Police say a car was shot at repeatedly and the driver, a 41-year-old man, was injured in the upper body. He was transported to hospital, but his life is not in danger, say police.

Shortly afterward, shots were reported in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, near the intersection of Saint-Joseph Boulevard and Henri-Julien Avenue. No one was injured.

Police say they are investigating to determine if there is a connection between the collision and the shootings. Montreal police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant says it’s possible those in the vehicle were involved in the shootings.

The province’s independent police watchdog is now involved.

with files from Chloë Ranaldi

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