Ontario faced a shortage of personal protective equipment at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in part because it did not replenish its stockpiles over the previous years, an independent commission examining the impact of the health crisis on long-term care has heard. Ontario’s former deputy minister of health and long-term care, Bob Bell, told the independent commission that the province’s supply of personal protective equipment should have been refilled around 2017 or 2018, under the previous and current provincial regimes. Bell, who served as deputy minister for four years until mid-2018 and now chairs an advisory panel for the Revera chain of nursing homes, said there was no conscious decision to let the stockpiles dwindle. The issue simply fell through the cracks, he said. “In the midst of everything else that goes on in government, the decision to replenish stockpiles was not undertaken as an affirmative action kind of …