Federal reserve overflowing with expired PPE from pandemic, AG report finds

OTTAWA — Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has accumulated so much excess medical inventory that it is now overflowing with expired or soon-to-be expired personal protective equipment (PPE).

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That is one of the findings of a new report by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada published on Thursday. It reveals that PHAC did not effectively manage the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile (NESS), a federal reserve of medical supplies.

In 2020, Canada was engaged in a race against the world to secure enough PPE and other critical supplies, such as respirators, masks, face shields and hand sanitizer.

The country’s efforts to stockpile these items were so successful that PHAC will essentially manage the disposal and the recycling of these items in the months ahead.

“Since most of the PPE in the stockpile was purchased during the COVID-19 pandemic and has a 5-year expiration, about 75% of the PPE inventory (1.044 billion items of the 1.4 billion total PPE items) will expire by March 31, 2027,” reads the report.

Federal Auditor General Karen Hogan found that, to reduce inventory levels, PHAC distributed 115.6 million medical supplies valued at about $27 million to provincial and territorial governments and federal organizations in the last fiscal year.

But over the same period, the agency wrote off more than 12 times that amount — $331 million — in medical supplies because of expiry and damage.

Among the recommendations included in the report, the auditor general recommends that PHAC should “develop and implement a divestment plan to reduce excess and expired supplies to minimize waste and limit storage, disposal, and recycling costs.”

The report also recommended the agency should “strengthen its authority to distribute medical supplies outside of public health emergencies.”

PHAC agreed to all the auditor general’s recommendations, while noting that “the exceptional volume of excess pandemic-related holdings” arose from a situation where Canada was procuring supplies amid global shortages and limited domestic supply.

It also said it will continue to work to distribute federal supplies outside of emergencies and that one of these options could be to support international humanitarian crises.

The cost of storing expired PPE is high. Over the last two fiscal years, it cost taxpayers no less than $6.3 million according to the auditor general’s findings.

The report also found that PHAC’s “inaction” also contributed to the loss of $20.4 million of crucial pharmaceuticals for responding to a “biological event.”

In December 2024, agency employees repackaged those pharmaceuticals to optimize limited freezer space. But in January 2025, the agency discovered that the freezers had been overfilled, which caused the temperature to rise above acceptable levels.

The compromised pharmaceuticals had to be thrown out, and PHAC initiated an investigation to identify the “deficiencies that contributed to the incident.”

The investigation found that warehouse employees had not followed established processes for repackaging products, and that there was a lack of preventative freezer maintenance, insufficient freezer space, and inadequate temperature monitoring.

“We found that these deficiencies were previously identified by the agency in 2022 and 2023 but had not been addressed prior to this loss,” the report said.

This is not the first time that the auditor general releases a critical performance audit focused on PHAC’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following the 2021 audit, the agency developed in 2024 a stockpile management plan, which outlined 14 actions to “address long-standing weaknesses.” As of March 2026, the agency had implemented five of these actions. The rest were in progress.

Despite these inadequacies, the report found that PHAC had responded to all 81 requests from provincial and territorial governments and federal organizations for medical supplies from the stockpile, with an average of five million items a year.

These requests covered a wide range of public health emergencies and supplies, the report said, including pharmaceuticals for infectious diseases like “mpox” and cots and blankets for Canadians affected by the wildfires.

National Post

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