COVID-19: Canada-Ontario to unveil $70M deal for Brockville mask production; Ottawa reports 37 new cases

Under the agreement, 3M is to increase capacity at its Brockville facility so that it can produce up to 100 million medical-grade N95 masks a year.

A provincial government official confirmed the masks are to be used to meet private sector, provincial, and North American market demand throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Ford has repeatedly said that Ontario needs to ramp up production of personal protective equipment given the experience early in the COVID-19 crisis, when Canada was scrambling in a global competition for a limited supply of masks and other equipment.

The prized N95 masks, used by frontline health care workers, were in particularly short supply.

This will be the second domestic contract to produce N95 masks, after Quebec-based Medicom signed a 10-year agreement to supply N95 and surgical masks to the federal government in April.

Medicom’s combined contracts are worth more than $113 million, and include providing 24 million surgical masks and 20 million N95 respirators each year.

Meanwhile, Ontario reported 131 new cases of COVID-19 Friday, although the figure is inexact due to data “glitches” from Thursday.

Results from 11 health units were not included in Thursday’s counts. Health Minister Christine Elliott tweeted that the delayed figures were added to Friday’s counts, providing an “overestimation of daily counts.”

Elliott said hospitalizations across the province remain stable as ICU admissions and vented patients both declined.