By Pepper Parr
April 3rd, 2020
BURLINGTON, ON
The message leaking out of Queen’s Park from highly respected journalist is that the province did do the right thing when it moved to an Emergency State earlier in March.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford – he is delivering on a daily basis. Not something many expected of him. Good on him.
Modular hospital being built at hospital to meet Covid response is serious business.
The province is expected to release data later today that will confirm that the right decisions were made and that hundreds of lives were saved.
The belief is that the rules in place now will get even stricter – and getting the message out will be pervasive.
More when the Premier delivers his message later today.
There are public messages that pop up on the right hand side of the Gazette front page – pay attention to them.
The Pandemic Response field hospital being built at the hospital now is being done for a reason.
Well Well Well what a surprise….NOT!… President Trump announced we are all friends again. He had a nice talk with 3M’s President.
3M said they would increase production numbers of PPE equipment by astronomical numbers to satisfy domestic and foreign markets.
3M are in business to supply product in huge numbers worldwide, what they absolutely don’t want is any Canadian manufactures to switch production to any kind of PPE self sufficiency.
The supply by 3M of PPE by 3M to Canada will put a damp squib on any government move to support critical Canadian manufacturing capability.
Doug Ford is the only one who has said that as long as he is Premier Ontario will manufacture its own critical supplies, so this will never happen again.
Unfortunately when things get back to some kind of normality, it will be hard to convince companies to make product in competition with huge multinational companies.
3M knows this, President Trump knows this, Doug Ford knows this.
Unless there is a fundamental change in the way Canada governs itself as a nation, Im afraid we will always be at the mercy of others who know how to conduct business.
Doug Ford has ramped up the power of Ontario’s industry making PPE equipment. He realizes we are on our own, it’s every country for itself. Fortunately Ontario has a thriving auto parts sector that are used for supplying millions not hundreds or thousands a myriad of complicated parts to industry. Specifications and Tooling is the lag time in firing up production but again fortunately mould making and machine tool manufacturing is still available to us. The Financial post has some good articles on what our industries are capable of.
The automotive Parts Manufactures association President Flavio Volpe (A new hero of mine) is an extraordinary energized person for an extraordinary time, burning up the phone lines to his associates and having the clout of the Ford governments iron in the glove to get PPE manufactures to share their specs with the more than willing auto parts companies to get product numbers into the millions.
This is something we should all get behind, Canadians manufacturing products for Canadians, as Doug Ford said along the lines of we should not have to beg for our survival.
The road map for Canada to take back its manufacturing in this emergency and beyond can be found in an amazing book by Arther Herman called ‘Freedoms Forge’ how America’s armed forces at the start of WW2 were using dilapidated equipment and could contribute nothing to the defeat of Nazis Germany. The call went out to the automotive sector to help ramp up the war effort by sheer manufacturing numbers. Big Bill Knudson, President of Chevrolet was the dollar a year man that was responsible for retooling America.
Ive read this book at least four times, it is a well written story that is still relevant today.
The other lesson that should be learned, once new Canadian owned companies spring up supplying critical products, they should be protected from purchase by foreign multinationals.
They should also be the only companies that can supply the Canadian Government.
One last thing SNC Lavalin should be in sole charge of procurement of emergency supplies on the worlds markets.
Please excuse the brevity. (fill in the blanks yourselves) Im a business man not a writer.