The Chinese Embassy in Canada on Saturday urged local media to clarify their facts after a report by local newspaper The Globe and Mail on Friday said "one million masks from China failed to meet standards."
"The Embassy verified with the City of Toronto and the relevant official clearly replied that there was a misunderstanding between what the City was purchasing and what the vendor was selling," the embassy spokesperson said in a statement.
The Globe and Mail's Friday report also claimed that Toronto recently recalled more than 60,000 faulty surgical masks made in China.
Canada is not the first country to have reported so-called "defective masks" imported from China.
In March, reports from some European countries including the Netherlands said face masks purchased from China were substandard and had quality problems, but preliminary investigations showed the masks were misused as they were initially exported for "non-medical purposes."
"If individual problems happened in the process of anti-epidemic cooperation, it should be resolved in a practical and realistic manner rather than being interpreted politically," the spokesperson emphasized.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had responded to the matter earlier in the month, saying it's irresponsible for some media to hype up the so-called quality problems of Chinese anti-epidemic products before making clear the facts.
