Health Canada Can’t Find Documents for 7,500 Scrapped Ventilators Worth $22,000 Each

A ventilator waits to be used for a COVID-19 patient going into cardiac arrest at St. Joseph's Hospital in Yonkers, N.Y. in this file photo. The Canadian Press/AP-John Minchillo

Health Canada says it can’t find records on the purchase of new $22,000 ventilators later sold as scrap metal for $6 apiece, leading to a Conservative MP’s allegations that the omission is either “incompetence or corruption.”

“I don’t understand why they would do this,” Tory MP Cheryl Gallant told Blacklock’s Reporter, adding, “It sounds like a shotgun approach to procurement.”

“Was it incompetence or corruption? Did the Public Health Agency lose track of these units? Were they unsuitable for use?”

One of Ms. Gallant’s constituents, paramedic Luke Halstead of Petawawa, Ont., bought dozens of the ventilators licensed for use in 2020 when they were later auctioned as scrap metal by Public Services and Procurement Canada.

“I am glad he brought this to the taxpayers’ attention,” Ms. Gallant said.

StarFish Medical of Toronto, the manufacturer of the emergency ventilators, was awarded a $169.5 million sole-sourced contract in 2020 to deliver up to 7,500 devices, worth around $22,600 apiece. The company has declined to comment on the sale.

Health Canada said on April 18 that it had no documents on the StarFish purchase.

“Having completed a thorough search, we regret to inform you we were unable to locate any records,” said an official, according to Blacklock’s.

Another company, CAE Inc. of Montreal, received a $282.5 million contract for ventilators that failed federal tests twice.

A third contractor, Thornhill Medical of North York, Ont., was paid $200.5 million for ventilators that Health Canada later said it didn’t want, internal documents said.

No parliamentary committee has yet examined the pandemic ventilator program that saw sole-sourced contracts worth more than $700 million awarded to selected manufacturers, including StarFish.

The ventilators ended up being auctioned off during a three-month period ending in early 2023, and were then sold as scrap metal for as little as $6 per carton.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many countries scrambled to secure enough ventilators to help those experiencing health complications from the virus. But with the discovery that elderly patients did not fare well on ventilators, and the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines, ventilator usage declined in late 2020.

By June 2022, more than 40,000 ventilators the government had ordered earlier in the pandemic were sitting unused in the federal emergency stockpile. Just over 2,000 of them had been deployed in Canada or abroad.