Federal government paid $20M for Ottawa company's COVID-19 test that flopped and was never delivered

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Spartan Bioscience created buzz by promising an Ontario\u002Dmade, portable testing cube that it said could detect the novel coronavirus in less than an hour…

Now, the Public Health Agency of Canada says it is writing off the amount as a loss pending the company’s liquidation, according to information recently tabled in the House of Commons and in the 2021 federal public accounts.

Seduced by the concept, the federal government as well as public health agencies and hospital networks in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec poured millions of dollars in orders for the product. For Health Canada, that amounted to $20 million following the signing of a March 2020 contract, it confirmed Tuesday.

“The Spartan COVID-19 system encountered numerous performance-related issues since the initial contract was signed in March 2020. The company was unable to fulfil the terms of the contract and did not deliver Health Canada-approved COVID-19 tests to the Government of Canada,” Health Canada spokeswoman Anna Maddison said in a statement.Article contentA representative of the company’s trustee Ernst & Young did not respond to emailed questions Tuesday.

The Spartan Bioscience loss is one of three COVID-19 advance payments worth a total of $105 million that PHAC wrote off in 2021.Photo by ERROL MCGIHON/Postmedia/File

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Shocker.

How much of that 20 mill was diverted to Liberal Party?

Is he related to Elizabeth Holmes looter

Is the owner a relative of a Liberal?

zchagla How many of the 27000 doses of bamvanlizumab did we end up using?

Good article. Curious about Baylis ventilators and Snc mobile hospitals-

Remember that time jkenney provincial Conservative party paid $30 million/yr for a bogus war room, several million for a pointless Allan Inquiry & $1.6 Billion for a dead pipeline? All while the federal govt stepped up & supported all Canadians through the pandemic? Bet you do!

Yes, our federal government was not proactive from the start. I remember. You can’t change that fact. Now we watch the top hat and cane dances and play blame games.

Where's the money?

Now *there's* the federal government we all know and barely tolerate.

Liberals just out here squandering money that’s not theirs.

I remember when my mentions became filled with random people touting this as the solution to the pandemic.

$20 million? That’s amateur hour waste for the Trudeau government. They literally have wasted billions of $ and have no clue where it went. Spoiler alert: they probably do know but there’s no way they are telling you, the taxpayer. You have no right to know how your $ is spent

This probably happens daily with JT and the Liberal government!

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