Natalie Gamauf spent long hours crunching numbers  

Natalie Gamauf, a Supply Team Leader at Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), joined the Pandemic Response Sector in April 2020. This experience completely changed the way she sees the work she and her colleagues are undertaking.

At the height of the first COVID-19 wave, when the Prime Minister was providing daily updates on Canada’s response to the pandemic, an important component of his statements involved the latest information about deliveries of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Behind the scenes, Natalie was working long hours, pulling data from hundreds of contracts, tracking deliveries, policing contracts, asking suppliers for delivery dates and crunching all the numbers with her team.

Those numbers informed the Prime Minister and his ministers, who informed Canadians about how many masks, gloves, gowns, litres of hand sanitizer, ventilators and other PPE Canada’s suppliers had been able to wrestle from the hyper-competitive international medical supply market.

Knowing that the upper echelons of government were dependent on timely and accurate daily information amounted to pressure, with a capital P.

“It was busy,” she said. “Some of us would take a break for an hour at the end of the work day. Then, we would log back in at around 6 pm to continue work and log off past midnight. The team would all log on a video conference and we would just keep each other company and answer each other’s questions as we were doing our data entry. In a time of physical and social distancing, these late-night sessions provided us with a team setting and a virtual office environment that gave us the motivation and peer support we needed to get the job done.”

Natalie, a PSPC employee for more than 12 years, joined the team from her regular job at the Fighters and Training division, where she manages procurement and contracts for the maintenance, repair and other engineering services for air flight simulators and training devices.

“Several of us on the team continued to have roles and responsibilities in the sectors we were borrowed from,” she added. “We were on double duty the whole time. We would go to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning totally exhausted, wake up and jump back into it first thing. The entire time I worked all those hours, I always made sure to keep track of my physical and mental health and knew when to take a step back when needed.”

But being part of the team has been an amazing opportunity and experience, she said. “None of what we did could have been done without the hard work of everyone on my team,” she said. “I feel blessed to have been able to work with all my colleagues, knowing we made a little difference each day in the lives of Canadians.”

Natalie went for a blood test and took a professional interest in the equipment being used by the technicians. “They all had gloves, masks, face shields and the important disposable gowns. I asked the technician who was drawing my blood how their supplies had been. ‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘We all feel well protected.’”

She went home and told the story to her colleagues and family. “As I said to everyone that day, ‘that’s why we do it.’ I have never felt so proud to be a public servant and to have been part of this effort.”

For more stories like this one, check out The faces behind the masks.