Ontario wrote off $1.4B of PPE, burning expired equipment: auditor

Ontario has written off more than a billion items of personal protective equipment at a cost of $1.4 billion since 2021, the province’s auditor general found.

Shelley Spence found that the province continues to purchase masks, gowns and other protective gear at similar levels to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, despite a significant drop in demand.

“We found that expired products began accumulating in provincial stores because some products purchased during the pandemic were below desired quality standards and were not used,” Spence wrote in his annual report.

There were serious shortages of protective gear in Ontario during the pandemic, especially in the early days when much of the province’s PPE inventory had already been exhausted.

The province created Supply Ontario in late 2020 to manage the stockpile but Spence found it didn’t have a system in place that could properly track the gear.

“Supply Ontario does not have an effective inventory management system to report costs in a timely manner and instead relies on an inefficient manual process for annual reporting,” Spence wrote.

Province signs long-term contract

Spence found that Supply Ontario now burns expired PPE – it has burned 780 million pieces so far – and converts it to thermal energy instead of recycling it like British Columbia does.

The province signed a long-term contract for PPE between October 2020 and April 2021, allowing it to purchase 188 million surgical masks annually. Yet it distributed only 39 million, or 21 percent, of the masks last year.

The auditor also found that Supply Ontario purchased 25 million N95 masks in 2024-25, but distributed only 5.5 million, or 22 per cent.

“Assuming that usage levels remain unchanged, we estimate that approximately 376 million surgical masks and 96 million N95 masks, costing approximately $126 million of taxpayers’ money, will expire between 2025/26 and 2030/31,” Spence wrote.

“If procurement commitments must be maintained to meet policies to protect public health and support local production, and Supply Ontario does not increase its distribution of PPE, waste will continue.”

However, Spence did not blame the government for the waste and said it was like the “Hunger Games” for purchasing protective gear.

“I can’t really blame the government for some of it going to waste, but I think it’s important for Ontarians to know what the value of what was disposed of is,” she said.

Public and Business Service Delivery Minister Stephen Crawford blamed the previous government for “substandard” foreign-made protective equipment.

“It was an effort to get PPE as quickly as possible and we did that,” Crawford said. “So we have no regrets in terms of what we were able to do. And subsequently, we’ve invested heavily in manufacturing that product right here in Ontario for good jobs and secure supply.”

Asked if she had any regrets about burning the 80 percent of unused PPE purchased by her government, Crawford said: “Would you want substandard PPE being used with your children?”

Auditor says province should increase use of PPE

Despite the massive stockpile of PPE, Spence found that only a “disproportionately low” two per cent of items go to hospitals, saying the province cannot meet their needs.

Spence suggested that Supply Ontario create a system to integrate and consolidate inventory records from different sources and better use that data to track and report on PPE levels. He also recommended the province conduct a value-for-money analysis to make better policy decisions on purchasing commitments.

Supply Ontario, which is run by Jamie Wallace, Premier Doug Ford’s former chief of staff, has agreed with all six of Spence’s recommendations.

It said it is currently consolidating inventory and records into a “single vendor warehouse management system” that will later be integrated into a single system “to enable timely financial reporting.”

The agency also agreed to provide an analysis to the government and will set up a working group with hospitals to better distribute the stockpiled products.

It also agreed to develop metrics to monitor and analyze protective equipment procurement.

New Democrat leader Merit Stiles called the auditor’s findings “absolute nonsense.”

“This is an agency that is run by the prime minister’s former chief of staff that is overseeing a contract that is literally burning hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.