Cabinet minister defends province’s $45M purchase of unused PPE masks

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This article was published 11/04/2023 (897 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While nearly a half-million unused respirator masks sit in storage three years after the province spent millions of dollars to get them, the cabinet minister responsible for government services defended the early pandemic purchase Tuesday.

James Teitsma, minister of Consumer Protection and Government Services, responded to allegations the government wasted money while trying to secure personal protective equipment for health-care workers during the pandemic and could have distributed the masks instead of keeping them in storage.

“What this did was it took Manitoba from (being) in a place where we might not have PPE, to knowing for certain that we would, no matter what, and that’s what’s important,” Teitsma said during question period in the legislature Tuesday, responding to Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont’s calls for an audit into the government’s spending on unusable protective gear.

In May 2020, the government announced it secured 500,000 reusable respirator masks from a local company, Precision ADM Inc., and that the masks would be supplied to front-line health-care workers. But the provincial government has now confirmed the reusable masks weren’t practical because they took too long to clean. Most were never used, and 490,000 of the masks are still in storage. In 2020, the government spent more than $35 million on the masks via a directly awarded, untendered contract, and paid more than $10 million in vendor payments to the company in the 2020-21 fiscal year, according to provincial public disclosure statements and Manitoba public accounts.

The reusable respirators rolled out at the Health Sciences Centre in January 2021 for fit testing, a provincial government spokesperson said in a statement.

“While effective, time and resources were required to reuse the masks,” the statement reads.

“Initially believed that a quick hand wipe would be sufficient when using and reusing these respirators, Health Canada’s standard operating procedure for hand-wipe cleaning would require health-care workers to disassemble, clean and reassemble the respirators multiple times per shift. The hand-wipe method takes approximately 14 minutes to complete each time. This is time that would take staff away from providing direct patient care.”

The province said it looked into other options to clean and reassemble the masks via a medical repurposing device, but it wasn’t efficient when surgeries ramped up again. It took eight hours to clean and reassemble 72 masks, the province said.

The reusable masks were designed by a local physician and were meant to be sterilized and reused up to 30 times each. The masks are now used only on staff for whom a disposable model doesn’t fit, although the province said it is working with the manufacturer to find more efficient ways to use them.

The masks and filters have a three-year expiry date — between November 2023 and July 2025 for the filters, and between January 2024 and July 2025 for the masks. The province said it expects the expiry dates will be extended to five years.

After CBC News first reported 98 per cent of the masks were never used, Lamont called for an audit, saying they could have been used by teachers or other front-line workers. He also criticized the province’s previous “unusable” pandemic purchases in 2020, including locally produced hand sanitizer that was recalled by Health Canada for using an unauthorized high grade of ethanol, and purchasing unauthorized N95 masks that resulted in a lawsuit against the province.

“This is a huge amount of money to be spending on masks that couldn’t be used when people were begging for them,” Lamont said after question period, calling for an independent audit and government explanation.

In the legislature, Teitsma dismissed those allegations.

“There was a time when there was no PPE available. Where N95 masks were in such high demand and low supply that we couldn’t get a shipment to come to Manitoba. In that context,” he said, a Manitoba company stepped in to supply reusable masks to nurses and doctors.

“That’s impressive innovation,” he said. “I am so glad that we supported it.”

— With files from Carol Sanders

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca