Canada's Public Health Agency discarded 9 million masks to save money before pandemic

According to internal emails, a frustrated contractor told the Department of Public Works it was "killing our doctors and nurses" by rationing pandemic masks from the outbreak of COVID. Shortages caused by mismanagement of a national stockpile were "beyond embarrassing," said a Canadian distributor.

"Currently, hospitals have no masks," wrote Anatoliy Melnichuk, CEO of Safe Direct Medical Supplies of Toronto. Melnichuk was a business partner with Michele Romanow of CBC Dragons' Den. "Nurses are talking and treating patients with surgical masks which offer zero protection from the virus," he wrote.

Melnichuk expressed frustration in a series of emails dated March 24 and 25, 2020, when the Public Health Agency was not recommending public use of pandemic masks due to a severe shortage, reported Blacklock's. "We are debating semantics. Meanwhile, people are naked in battle," he wrote.

Melnichuk continued: "For a first-world country, this is beyond embarrassing. It's approaching negligence."

Records obtained by the Commons government operations committee earlier disclosed the Public Health Agency, before the pandemic, threw away 8,839,942 pieces of personal protective equipment after closing three warehouses to save $900,000 a year in leasing costs. Landfilled items included 2,355,000 surgical masks and 5,382,978 high-grade N95 masks, as well as medical gloves and coveralls.

"Saying we were caught off guard will not be sufficient when we had China, Italy, Spain, France and Taiwan all as case studies months before," wrote Safe Medical Supplies' Melnichuk. Failing to distribute high-grade masks to hospitals immediately "will effectively be killing our doctors and nurses and continuing to spread this disease while our country is shut down and also suffering an economic disaster," he wrote. The staff did not comment.

To date, the Public Health Agency has never explained why they failed to replace millions of masks thrown away before the pandemic outbreak on March 11, 2020. The Agency, within days, knew it was drastically short of supplies. "We are facing a real crunch," read a March 20 staff email.

"The requests, particularly for N95s, far exceed our stockpile," wrote staff. "The team is working on trying and triaging, and we have modest stock coming in, but too late."

New Democrat MP Matthew Green, who requested figures on mismanaged supplies, earlier noted disclosure of the information took a year. "It speaks to a reluctance of this government to have any accountability in decisions made in the lead-up to the pandemic," said Green.

According to other internal emails, federal agencies quietly arranged to ship hundreds of thousands of COVID masks to Quebec when all other provinces faced shortages from the onset of the pandemic. Political aides in the Prime Minister's Office stressed "we should be careful about what we say" in giving Québec preferential treatment.

Internal emails dating from the first weeks of the pandemic disclose the Department of Foreign Affairs had its own Ottawa stockpile of 400,000 surgical masks. All hospitals at the time faced a "massive shortage of personal protective equipment," according to a March 30, 2020 staff email.

Aides on March 21 said Quebec asked for supplies "far greater than what other provinces are asking for."