Before the COVID-19 crisis hit, placing an order for medical masks was a routine affair. A delivery company would pick them up from the factory in the United States and deliver them — in a timely fashion — to the hospital.

Outside of completing import forms at customs or acknowledgment of receipt, the shipment arrived without fanfare. It was all part of a routine and efficient supply chain.

But these are not normal times.

Earlier this month, when Canadian hospitals placed an order for 500,000 medical masks to help protect front-line workers from contracting the deadly coronavirus, U.S. president Donald Trump asked 3M, a major U.S. maker of N95 respirator masks, to stop exporting to Canada and Latin America. His country was low on supplies.

After Trump’s intervention, the Canadian government stepped in and took control over the orders from hospitals and the Canadian army was brought in as project manager, to make sure the delivery of the goods was done as safely and as smoothly as possible.

Mississauga-based Purolator, a courier and transportation company, which is 91 per cent owned by Canada Post, was chosen to move the important cargo.

“The difference now is the speed with which this stuff was needed,” said John Ferguson, CEO of Purolator, which has 12,000 employees, offices around the world, and an annual revenue of about $1.9 billion.

The 500,000 medical masks are safely across the border, already delivered to health agencies across Canada, which handle the delivery to individual hospitals.

The journey of the masks shows how the globally integrated delivery system has been turned on its heels by the coronavirus pandemic.

Purolator first got a sense that the coronavirus was going to cause delivery problems in January when China closed down factories, slowing cargo deliveries.

Then passenger travel was slowed, meaning there were fewer planes to move what cargo there was. By the time China started reopening its factories at the end of March, cargo bins were grounded in Europe.

“We call it a box imbalance, container imbalance,” said Ferguson.

Much like the run on toilet paper in grocery stores, there’s an international run on needed medical supplies to fight the pandemic.

“When the federal government gets involved, it gets to the highest level of priority,” said Ferguson. “And so they’re able to use their weight, leverage, scale, authority, all that to get access to product that is so critical.”

“It became critical to get access to the supply and move it ... as quickly as possible while still maintaining control of inventory.”

Trump’s protectionist response was a challenge that needed to be overcome through backroom diplomacy and politicking.

“Prime Minister Trudeau has to make this happen. And he does the right thing, decisively, and says we’ve got to get this product in here. And we need to make sure we have enough supplies for our health-care workers in this crisis,” Ferguson said.

“When we were called, we had this thing up in 24 hours. We had a solution put together which, again, that’s not normal. Normally, you plan inventories, you’d get engineers, put up buildings, take months of IT integration.”

As the product manager, the army oversaw the safety of deliveries and quality control at various checkpoints while Purolator used its network to move the products out to hospitals, quickly, rather than waiting for each individual hospital to place orders.

Ferguson said the quick delivery of the masks shines a well deserved spotlight on truckers and delivery personnel who’ve had to put up with indignities while performing essential services including being denied access to bathrooms.

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“We’ve been doing our best as a courier and transportation company to make sure our front-line employees are safe and that they’re appreciated,” said Ferguson.

“This project, which is a pretty big project, brings a real sense of pride and purpose to our team,” said Ferguson.

“All the press and everything that’s been done has been really helping keep people motivated. They find a level of appreciation in it.”

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