Trudeau government’s pandemic agency did not know about dwindling medical stockpile

The Vice President of the Public Health Agency Sally Thornton told MPs on Wednesday that they were now feeling the consequences of this, having to make course corrections to keep hospitals running.

Despite masks and ventilators being in critical supply, this agency has had to make "some interim course corrections." Originally created in 2004 as a means to prepare for a pandemic, the Agency was entirely unprepared for a pandemic.

This may come as a surprise as auditors specifically warned the Agency to create a medical stockpile in the case of a pandemic like the coronavirus outbreak.

When a Conservative MP asked Thornton about her work and what stockpile she had been keeping, she responded by saying that she was in charge of the stock, and that "I couldn’t tell you" what stock she had before the pandemic.

Trudeau's Health Minister Patty Hajdu, however, had a blunter answer about the Agency's preparedness: "to your question about whether we had enough, no."

In order to remedy Canada's lack of medical equipment, the Trudeau government had to spend $2 billion on bringing in masks and ventilators.

Worse still, Thornton could not tell MPs about the stockpile of individual provinces, nor could she recall how the agency kept an inventory of their equipment.

Thornton's Agency receives $675 million per year from the taxpayer in order to prepare for a pandemic. Despite this, health officials admitted that the country had been caught "flat-footed."