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Good afternoon, everybody. I call the meeting to order.
Welcome to meeting number 21 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. The committee is meeting today from 3:36 to 5:36. We'll hear from PHAC and PSPC as part of the committee's study on the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then discuss committee business afterwards.
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind all participants in this meeting that screenshots or taking photos of your screen are not permitted.
To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow. Interpretation in this video conference will work very much like in a regular committee meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor, English or French.
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In order to ensure social distancing in the committee room, if you need to speak privately with the clerk or the analyst during the meeting, please email them through their committee email address. For those people who are participating in the committee room, please note that masks are required unless you are seated and when physical distancing is not possible.
I will now invite the witnesses to make their opening statements. We will begin with the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Thank you.
I'd like to thank the chair of the committee and the committee members for inviting the Public Health Agency of Canada to speak today. My name is Cindy Evans, and I'm the vice-president of emergency management. In this role I'm responsible for the national emergency strategic stockpile.
Joining me today is Martin Krumins, vice-president and chief financial officer of the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have impacts across multiple sectors. Access to critical personal protective equipment for frontline health care workers and others in the health care system is a top priority for the Public Health Agency of Canada. Provincial, territorial and local governments are responsible for preparing for the most common emergencies and the federal government has a role to provide additional support during exceptional circumstances.
One way we do this is through the national emergency strategic stockpile or the NESS, which is the federal government's stockpile for emergencies with health implications. The NESS plays two important roles. It provides surge capacity to provinces and territories when their existing resources have been exhausted, and it's the sole provider of certain niche assets for rare public health emergencies, for example, costly and rarely used vaccines or antidotes.
To respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada mobilized the NESS to support response efforts. The agency worked with Public Services and Procurement Canada as well as provinces and territories to lead the bulk procurement of personal protective equipment or PPE, medical equipment and supplies for Canada. We rapidly activated to accept, assess and allocate donations that came in from domestic and international donors. We increased our internal capacity and created a dedicated team on the procurement of PPE to identify appropriate types and quantities and to direct procurement.
We also added warehousing capacity and increased the footprint of the NESS by approximately one million square feet of dedicated space.
To address early quality issues with PPE, we also worked with the National Research Council to establish capacity to test products to determine if they met the performance and technical specifications required by the health care sector. Steady supplies of PPE and medical equipment continue to arrive daily and 80% are rapidly allocated to the provinces and territories to support health care workers across the country. The other 20% is retained to replenish the inventory of the NESS so it can provide PPE and medical equipment to provinces and territories with urgent needs above and beyond their allocation.
In addition to the original bulk procurement efforts, Innovation, Science and Economic Development and PSPC continue to galvanize Canadian industries to increase domestic manufacturing capacity and reduce dependencies on external supply chains. This includes retooling facilities to produce equipment and supplies, including portable ventilators, surgical masks and rapid testing kits.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented situation and it continues to challenge the Canadian health care sector at all levels. Demand for PPE, medical equipment and supplies created global supply challenges that required a whole-of-government approach to deliver innovative solutions to meet the needs of our health care sector.
As much as we achieved in responding to COVID-19, there remains work to do. Life-cycle management processes are top of mind, and we utilize a first in, first out protocol so that PPE, medical devices and equipment are put to use well before expiry.
We committed to reviewing the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and look forward to receiving the recommendations from the Office of the Auditor General on their COVID-19-related audits. This information will help to shape the future of emergency management at the Public Health Agency of Canada and to better position the NESS for the future.
Thank you.
[Translation]
Mr. Chair, thank you for having me here alongside my colleagues from the Public Health Agency of Canada.
With me today is Alain Dorion, Director General within the Procurement Branch at Public Services and Procurement Canada.
It is our pleasure to appear before this committee to talk about our department's role in Canada's National Emergency Strategic Stockpile.
As you know, the stockpile is managed by the Public Health Agency of Canada. It contains supplies that provinces and territories can request in cases of emergency.
These supplies include a variety of items such as personal protective equipment, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and social service supplies, such as beds and blankets.
The Public Health Agency of Canada is responsible for maintaining the stockpile, assessing the composition of the stockpile, and restoring supplies that are distributed. Public Services and Procurement Canada is responsible for purchasing supplies on behalf of, and with direction from, the Public Health Agency of Canada.
[English]
Ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, PSPC has worked closely with PHAC to acquire supplies for distribution to provinces and territories to support our frontline health care workers. These purchases are supplementary to the existing national emergency strategic stockpile as well as to the stocks and supplies that exist in and are being procured directly by the provinces and territories. We've also provided procurement support to PHAC regarding warehousing and distribution services when needed.
In the beginning, much of the supplies we were buying were coming in from overseas, and we were operating in a highly competitive international market. Canada simply did not have the domestic manufacturing capability at the time for vital equipment such as N95 respirators and other critical supplies.
We have since established important domestic sources of supply that, in the early days of the pandemic, PSPC had to take an aggressive approach to buying in a complex global environment, especially when it came to personal protective equipment for frontline health care workers. That approach included buying large quantities of supplies in bulk with delivery spread over several months and supplementing those orders by purchasing everything immediately available that met Health Canada's requirements.
As part of these efforts, just over one year ago now, the PSPC launched a call to action asking suppliers to come forward with products or services they could offer to support Canada's response to the pandemic. The response was overwhelming, with approximately 26,000 responses from both Canadian and international businesses.
At the same time, due to a plan to mobilize industry being led by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, domestic manufacturers began to retool and ramp up domestic production of much-needed supplies. In all, so far, the Government of Canada has purchased approximately 2.5 billion pieces of equipment to help Canada fight COVID-19, with many of those supplies now being made in Canada.
Today, domestic production is now set up in many places across the country, and marketplaces for PPE are much more stable in general. That is why, over the past few months, we have been able to return to using competitive bidding processes to secure the goods and services needed to meet Canada's evolving pandemic needs where circumstances permit and when the needs are not urgent.
Open competitions for goods and services are now regularly being launched on our website for a range of PPE, medical equipment and supplies. In addition, to further support domestic manufacturing, we've also issued a number of competitive procurement processes limited to Canadian manufacturers only.
[Translation]
By continuing to securing vital supplies through competitive processes, and with domestic suppliers now making up a greater portion of our supplier pool, we are better equipped for the longer term.
I can tell you that we are committed to continuing to support the Public Health Agency of Canada in their efforts to maintain and replenish the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile.
Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions.
I am not laughing at you, Ms. Evans. I am not laughing at anyone from the public service, of course. I am laughing at the stupidity of the initial order for 40,000 ventilators. We now have 25,000. I feel that will be enough for about 50 years. I hope that the government will be able to cancel the additional 15,000 units because they really have no use. Whatever the case, thank you for your answer.
My next question is about personal protective equipment. At the beginning of 2020, Canada sent a large number of items—20 million, I believe—to China. I would like to know from which department the order came. Who gave the order to send that equipment to China? It was in February 2020.
Let me start by thanking both PHAC and PSPC not only for participating here today once again but also for the great work that both of your departments and you have done. You have strong leadership. We started from a very disadvantaged situation and far from ideal circumstances over the last year, and what you, your organization and members have done needs to be appreciated, acknowledged and commended. On behalf of all of us, I'd like to thank you all.
Let me start by asking questions to Ms. Evans. In my understanding, PHAC is responsible for NESS. NESS, by its nature, contains medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and social services supplies that can be deployed usually within 24 hours to the provinces and territories, upon request, in cases of emergencies such as infection and disease outbreak.
Ms. Evans, can you give us some idea of the types of requests that have come in and how much you have supported provinces? In your opening remarks, you talked about how 80% of the stock that comes into NESS goes to the provinces and territories.
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Since the beginning of the pandemic, we've been working collaboratively with the provinces and the territories to understand their current supply situation. One important factor is the burn rate for supplies. This is an ongoing dialogue and that data sharing has been a really important part of our approach. We look to modelling in terms of what we're seeing with the pandemic from an epidemiological perspective as well as what we're seeing in terms of burn rates from the provinces and territories and the ordering that's happening.
Our jurisdictions are able to make purchases internationally and domestically, and we've spoken about the request-for-assistance proposal. In addition, there is sharing across the provinces if there are commodities that they feel are not going to be used. That is taken into account as we look at the stocks that are going to be required.
We have, primarily, put in place an eight-week supply across those primary commodities for the national emergency strategic stockpile. Individual jurisdictions are also looking to build their own stockpiles, and the levels of preparedness they have set for those varies. A number, for example, are setting themselves up to have a supply for 12 weeks or more.
Members of this committee, and to the witnesses who are here today, I want to thank you for this opportunity to revisit this conversation. You'll know and recall that in multiple meetings I've brought up the urgency around the national emergency strategic stockpile.
[Technical difficulty—Editor] through you, Mr. Chair. When we moved the motion at this committee to receive documents, we did so with the parameters that they would only be redacted in accordance with the principles as laid out in the motion.
First, did anybody within the national emergency strategic stockpile department responsible, PHAC and others, have any role in redacting the documents that we received?
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That was just in Regina, respectfully.
I don't want to beat around the bush. I want to be clear. Again, this is not on you, Ms. Evans. This is maybe going hard on the problem. It's not a personal thing, so forgive my tone if I come off sharp, but you haven't disclosed.... We know it was two million in Regina.
Am I to then extrapolate that it could also be assumed that in the other two locations that were closed there were also two million critical PPE, N95 masks, that would have been thrown away as well?
Just a few months before COVID-19 hit, the government effectively shut down Canada's pandemic warning system. This is a system, of course, that had established itself during the SARS outbreak in 2003 or just after as a frontline defence against pandemics. It was known for its capabilities and it was praised for them. As an intelligence unit, one of the warning system's key functions was to help inform Canada's risk assessment for an outbreak, which helps the government decide how quickly to respond and what measures are needed going forward.
For much of January, February and March, the Liberals maintained that the virus posed a “low threat to Canada” even as COVID-19 was spreading aggressively around the world. Even when the World Health Organization changed its rating to high at the end of January and warned other countries to prepare, Canada maintained a low risk and did nothing.
Had Canada's pandemic warning system been fully operational, do you feel that the government would have heightened the threat level of the pandemic at an earlier date and, therefore, increased safety measures such as closing the border?
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Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, Ms. Evans and Mr. Dorion and all the witnesses for your testimony here today.
I offer a big thank you to all the staff at PSPC and PHAC for your heroic efforts during the pandemic to keep Canadians safe under incredibly difficult and historic situations.
Ms. Evans, the federal government has been a partner with the provinces and territories since the beginning of COVID. We've heard about the extensive funding that the federal government has provided directly to the provinces and territories. Of note, the fall economic statement allocates about $7.6 billion to rapidly procure more than two billion pieces of personal protective equipment, and an additional $1.5 billion to provide warehousing and logistic support to rapidly deliver critical PPE and medical supplies to provinces, territories and indigenous communities, as well as maintaining the readiness of the NESS.
Can you tell us more about how this funding will be used when Bill is passed?
Through the estimates this year, the national emergency stockpile has received a significant influx in funding. The total this year has been $7.4 billion. As you will note, to date the department has spent approximately $3.9 billion of this funding for a variety of commodities, including personal protective equipment, testing, supplies, warehousing, logistics and other services as well as supplies to support the vaccine deployment.
As this funding will continue, so will the response for next year. Funds will be reserved in the next fiscal year as well to continue the use and purchase of these commodities.
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Thank you very much for that.
In your previous response, Ms. Evans, I believe you touched on the auxiliary supplies that will be provided as the vaccination efforts are ramping up right now.
As we ramp up those vaccinations and vaccine clinics across the country, can you tell us a little about what role PPE and the NESS will play in that process?
Are we ready for that demand, whether it's syringes or disposable gowns or just supporting the efforts on the ground? I would like to get a better understanding of that, please.
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The vaccine rollout and the specifics of that work are outside my purview. What I can say is that, on personal protective equipment, we continue to work closely in collaboration with the provinces and territories.
Supplies that would be needed for vaccinations such as gloves, gowns and other pieces of PPE would form part of the demand and the burn rate [Technical difficulty—Editor] rollout, we have provided supplies in rollout like adhesive bandages, alcohol swabs, safety needles, sharps containers, syringes, fridges and freezers.
Certainly there are ongoing dialogue and discussions with the provinces in terms of their individual vaccine rollout plans within their jurisdictions. Certainly if the committee would like additional information on those plans, other officials could come to the table to share that information.
On May 15, 2020, a representative of the Public Health Agency of Canada stated that the national emergency strategic stockpile, the NESS, had an operating budget of $3 million per year and 18 full-time employees. Ten or so years ago, the budget was almost double and there were 27 employees.
What has been the impact of those budget cuts on the performance, the actions and the response of the NESS?
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What I can say is that, as you noted, the budget for operating the NESS was significantly less than it is this year, so annual-based funding for the NESS operations has ranged between $3 million to $5 million.
In the most recent year, that operating budget has grown significantly to almost double and is now sitting at approximately $6 million for operations and FTEs. In the past I can say that specific investments for the purchases of equipment have been time limited or through internal reallocation, and some of that time-limited funding was, for example, a four-year investment for medical countermeasures against smallpox and anthrax that was made in 2015-16.
With the onset of the pandemic, those time-limited investments have grown significantly and are close to $7.4 billion. The operating budget of the NESS has grown and is there.
In terms of the operations and how effective they are, I believe my colleague Cindy Evans would be able to speak to the effectiveness of that.
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It's clear that there was a [
Technical difficulty—Editor] stockpile. To follow their own reports that go as far back as 2012, they knew that they were going to have issues with respect to the expiry and the maintenance of the standards for our stockpiles. This is something that has been reported on time and time again. In 2012, they knew that the assets stored within the NESS were no longer in good quality due to long-term storage, yet this government still failed to address the system management failures, resulting in the shuttering and disposal of millions of critical PPE on the eve of a global pandemic.
I still have not heard a rationalization for how this abject failure was acted on. This is something that has been known for almost a decade. I asked Ms. Thornton. I moved a motion hoping to get this information. I'm finding that, in all the materials that have been given to us, this information has either been redacted or not submitted.
There must be a national standard on how many N95 masks the national emergency strategic stockpile was supposed to have. We heard today that two million were thrown away in one location. We knew, and I have been on this now for the better part of a year, that two other locations were also shuttered. It is left to me to believe that those responsible, in the past it would have been Ms. Thornton and we have Ms. Evans here today.... Again, it's not personal. They're just staffers on this file. If there were two million thrown out in Regina, there could have been two million thrown out at each of the other locations.
We started off this pandemic woefully behind the rest of the world as it related to having access to these. I have documents in which they're just unwilling to share what the stock levels looked like. I've asked questions in multiple different ways and iterations, trying to get to the information on who's accountable for the disposal of critical PPE.
This is all without it being said that, on the procurement side, even when we tried to catch up—you recall from the work of this committee—11 million masks were procured and nine million of them were deemed to be unfit for use and not to the standards of the N95.
It's my position that there was an abject failure. I think this is a scandal, quite frankly. I've been saying this now for the better part of a year. There are now internal documents that support that the requests from the provinces—this is March 18, 2020—far exceeded our stockpile, yet nobody within government wants to take responsibility.
Therefore, I'm moving this motion. I want to make sure that this committee is clear about what transpired in the shuttering of the national emergency strategic stockpile. How many were thrown out, and were they replenished? How was Canada situated on the eve of a global pandemic—which we knew to be coming going back 10 years now, this pandemic coming after SARS—to be in a position to address it?
Those are my comments, and I think you can hear my frustration. I just want to reiterate that it's not directed at any individual person. It's just that I've been after this now for the better part of a year.
Mr. Green, I think you bring up a lot of excellent points. I think we certainly do support this, especially when you consider that in September 2019, just three months, if not less, before what Ms. Evans said was the warning given on December 31 to Dr. Tam and others about this problem coming out of China, PHAC was bragging about how well prepared they were, yet we know different.
Just to clarify, Mr. Green, when you talk about the standard in your motion, you're referring to set inventory numbers for N95 and other items.
I just want to correct a few points that my friend, Mr. Green, has mentioned. Obviously, everybody was trying to procure PPE in the midst of this pandemic. I remind him that there's a reason why Mr. Trump tried to block some exports to Canada at the time for N95 masks. It wasn't just that Canada had an issue of procuring PPE when the whole world was trying.
He's asking for information with regard to the national standard, so would he be willing to change the wording of the national standard? I, too, get confused by what he means by that. If I'm getting confused, and we're going to be perhaps adopting a motion and sending it to the department, I'd hate to see the department reporting back and giving us the national standard wording.
Can he clarify that in his motion, just so everyone understands around this table what he wants?
I guess I'm trying to get some clarification of the reasoning behind the motion. You're looking at the fact that literally $7.4 billion of PPE was procured. That's PPE and medical equipment. For nitrile and vinyl glove pairs alone you're looking at 781 million, and 60 million face shields were received. I'm seeing 130 million medical gowns. This is as of February 26, 2021. If you're looking at N95 and KN95 respirators, 115 million were received, along with 10 million cloth masks, 63 million face coverings and 25,000 medical ventilators.
I guess I'm trying to understand this. It seems the supplies that were procured over this time have met the demand that was generated locally. It's up to the provinces and the local health units to indicate that they require additional assistance. PSPC and PHAC knocked it out of the park, providing, again, tens and hundreds of millions of pieces of PPE to help supply and fill the breach. Even earlier in testimony today, we heard one of our colleagues at the committee say that we've ordered so much of this stuff that we should consider potentially nullifying some of the orders because we have too much of it.
I'm looking at this situation and I see PSPC and PHAC really accelerating purchases and really stepping up to the plate in such a difficult situation, knowing that there is such tremendous demand globally in such a competitive situation. Again, they are hitting the ball out of the park in making sure that we procure an enormous amount of PPE to make sure that we have double, triple and quadruple the coverage of what is required.
I'm trying to understand this. I'm always open to discussion. It's the way that I approach committee and approach the work here. However, I'm trying to understand exactly what my colleague Mr. Green is trying to get at with this motion and what the purpose of the motion is. Again, I'm looking at this information and PHAC and PSPC, as I said, really ramped up the procurement process. They got to work quickly and created a PPE stockpile that I would say other countries probably wish they had.
Even looking forward right now, PSPC and PHAC are—
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Not at all. I'm actually really curious to get the answer here. I'm just trying to provide the context in terms of some of the questions I have.
Again, from the picture we received from the testimony here, which was excellent testimony, I have to say, we were actually quite nimble. We responded very quickly to the pandemic. We provided more than enough PPE for local and provincial partners to protect us during this pandemic. We responded very quickly in securing all of these countless pieces of personal equipment—and not only for the current crisis or the current demand. Looking forward, for example, the provinces and the local health units may possibly need support in order to roll out.... As we accelerate vaccinations and as more and more clinics are up and running, we'll need additional supports that way. PSPC and PHAC were looking not only at the challenge right in front of them but also very much forward to the future challenges that would come out of the vaccination efforts.
Again, I'm just trying to understand this, because that's the picture I heard from the testimony from Ms. Evans and Mr. Dorion. I want to put the ball back into my colleagues' court, because I want to understand exactly what we're looking for with this motion that's being put forward.
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I called it a national standard, Mr. Chair.
I called it a national standard because, having read the national emergency documents, I understood that there were recommendations that came out of SARS. I would imagine that in a program as important as this, there would be standards for what the levels and quantities of supply should look like. Perhaps “national standards” is an inaccurate thing for me to say, given the flexibility of this particular program. Maybe that will be a recommendation and an outcome from this motion.
To be very clear, Mr. Chair, there were recommendations on this that go back 10 years. Post-SARS, we saw fit to have national emergency strategic stockpile warehouses across the country. Somebody, somewhere along the line, made the decision to close them down—to close three of them down.
I'll reiterate. We knew that two million were thrown out in Regina. I'm seeking to find out how many more of these units were thrown out and whether or not they were ever replenished.
If I can answer the second point in terms of context and this language of knocking it “out of the park”, 20,000 Canadians are dead. You want to talk about procurement that took months to get online, to where we actually had real domestic products here, shipped, on the ground, that were qualified for distribution. Of the first 11 million N95 masks to hit the ground, the soil here in Canada, nine million were deemed unfit for use as N95 masks. We throw away millions, we bring in millions and all the while Canadians are contracting COVID.
As for the mental gymnastics of the contortionist, Mr. Chair, of patting ourselves on the back on this file when we failed to live up to the recommendations of our own reports that go back a decade, it's just simply something that I can't fathom. We know that their budget got slashed almost in half. Their staffing got slashed. This government is again failing to meet their own recommendations, and I would like to get to the heart of the matter, which is how we started off this pandemic.
We now know that masks are critical. We know, through some of the things that I was able to obtain, that provinces, right off the hop.... From the moment we started, we were behind. We responded to China and other places and sent this abroad, but then, as soon as Newfoundland, B.C. and medevac in the north were seeking N95 masks, staff said that it far exceeded their current stockpile.... I would wager that if we had had a system in place with the kind of management logistics that would have replenished the two million in Regina, that if we had kept those warehouses, we could have filled those requests right off the bat.
We're in our third wave right now, so on hitting it out of the park, which park are you in? We're modelling scenarios that are worse than anything we've ever seen before. We now know it to be true that this is airborne. N95 masks are going to be critical. The fact that we want to spend this committee patting ourselves on the back a year into this game negates the accountability this government has on the failure of having adequate supplies in the NESS to begin with.
I would love to be proven wrong. I would love for these documents to come back and say, “We threw out six million and we got six million, so it was a net-zero loss—no big deal—and we are ready to go.” However, that's just simply not the case. There have been cuts to this program. They were cutting their own corners. They're not listening to their own recommendations. Dr. Tam was on the record 10 years ago in talking about post-SARS and what we needed to do. They knew, yet they failed to act on the national emergency strategic stockpile.
When you ask me what I'm getting at.... We shouldn't be in this third wave. That's what I'm getting at. We should have a program where we have domestic supplies taken care of. I would love to see it nationalized. I happen to think that the government should be producing critical PPE and vaccines, quite frankly, yet here we are, scrambling to this very day.
Again, it was Ms. Thornton before. It's Ms. Evans today. It's not about the individual people. It's not even about Mr. Kusmierczyk. I'm fired up because it has been a year in the making for me to get these documents. They filibustered the last time. You'll recall that I passed the motion, Parliament got prorogued and I brought it back. I got superheated. In fact, I even had suggestions from members on the other side that I needed to chill out on this.
I'm not chilling out on this, because 20,000 people have died. That's where we are. I want to find out if this national emergency strategic stockpile is under a better management system where it can deal with its own logistics in a way that doesn't result in millions of critical PPE being thrown into dumpsters on the eve of a global pandemic. It's quite simple.
I hope that the clarification on the amendment in terms of the numbers and getting clear about what those supply levels were.... I predict we're going to see a drastic decline without a replenishment, and I predict we're going to see that we came into this pandemic vastly unprepared despite our own recommendations. That's what I'm predicting, and I would love to be proven wrong.
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Is that correct, Mr. Green? Yes. Thank you.
Is there any further debate on the amendment? Seeing none, I will ask for consent on the amendment.
(Amendment agreed to)
(Motion as amended agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
The Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Green.
Thank you to the witnesses for bearing with us as we move forward.
We will go to Mr. McCauley for five minutes.
On that issue, I'd like to put through a matter-at-hand motion, please, from the floor in consideration of the fact that TBS has submitted documents to this committee that were not what the committee asked for.
The committee asked very specifically that the Treasury Board Secretariat provide the committee with “all monthly COVID-19 expenditures reports and COVID-19 spending data”. For some reason, TBS has decided not to provide that information agreed to by the committee.
I would like to put forward a motion that the committee recall officials from the Treasury Board Secretariat to discuss the documents they provided regarding COVID-19 spending, and that the meeting be held no later than the third week of April.
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That's April 23, more specifically.
Specifically—and I'll be very brief on this—I know that Treasury Board collects information, and I am happy to read the email that Mr. Huppé sent out in March 2020, an entire year ago. It says, “TBS efforts to collect estimated expenditures related to Canada’s COVID-19 Economic Response Plan have been done on an exceptional basis, and these efforts have not been audited.”
It also says that TBS “has reached out to organizations to gather spending data related to COVID-19 on a monthly basis, recognizing that the ability to effectively track expenditures attributable to the COVID-19 response”.
Also in that same email, Treasury Board sent out an Excel spreadsheet to every single chief financial officer, asking for incremental expenditures, such as salary, overtime, operations—i.e., purchases—travel, grants, contributions, stat expenses and non-incremental expenditures, and asking for comments and current monthly expenditures.
The reason I bring this up is that it is very clear that Treasury Board reached out to all the CFOs in March 2020 to provide this information to Treasury Board. Treasury Board has this information—that's very clear—yet Treasury Board has refused the request from this committee to provide such information.
I would like to have Treasury Board please attend and explain to the Canadian people, the public, taxpayers and Parliament why it decided to ignore or defy a request from the committee.
With that said, we have no more questions.
I would like to thank the witnesses, Ms. Evans, Mr. Krumins, Mr. Mills and Mr. Dorion, for their presentations and their answers, and for bearing with us today with the issues we've had.
I would appreciate it if, where questions were asked and where you indicated you would provide that in writing to the committee, you do so at your earliest convenience so that we can get that to the committee quickly. Thank you very much.
The witnesses can go now.
With that said, the public portion of the meeting is now complete for the committee. We'll now proceed to the in camera portion.
When I suspend this meeting the technical staff will end this part of the meeting in Zoom, so you will have to go to your computers and re-enter with what was sent to you by the clerk. You should all have that.
With that said, we will suspend temporarily.