Hundreds of deleted emails related to the ArriveCan app have been recovered days after the head of the Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA) said there were no backup files available.
“We trust this clarifies any potential misinterpretation,” CBSA President Erin O’Gorman wrote to the House of Commons government operations committee, as first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter.
O’Gorman said the agency had been able to recover 1,806 pages of emails from Minh Doan, a former CBSA chief information officer.
During a government operations committee meeting on Oct. 22, Conservative MP Stephanie Kusie had
read out a communication from O'Gorman that said Doan’s email account was deleted as part of the Treasury Board
Secretariat’s service and digital directive. The committee had previously asked the agency to present all emails and text messages from Doan.
Doan previously told MPs that he had accidentally deleted around 1,700 emails from his laptop when attempting to transfer files from his old computer to a new one in 2023. The emails concerned the awarding of sole-sourced contracts to ArriveCan app contractors.
MPs on the government operations committee have been investigating ArriveCan, which was used to track the COVID-19 vaccination status of travellers entering Canada. In her report released in February, Auditor General Karen Hogan said CBSA’s documentation, financial records, and controls were “so poor” that the precise cost of ArriveCan could not be determined, but estimates based on available information put the cost at approximately $59.5 million.
Doan’s deleted emails are believed to be related to dealings with GC Strategies Inc., a two-man consulting firm that was paid $19.1 million for its work on ArriveCan. Hogan’s report said there was little documentation to show how or why GC Strategies was chosen for the project, and MPs at committee have questioned who at CBSA made the decision to hire the company.
Doan has
said he was not responsible for choosing the company but that he “chose a strategic direction that met our urgent needs for speed and agility at the time.”
Former CBSA director-general Cameron MacDonald previously told the committee that Doan was the one who chose GC Strategies. He also said Doan had
threatened to blame MacDonald and former CBSA executive director Antonio Utano for the decision during a heated phone call, around the time that ArriveCan had come began to come under controversy amid news reports of its high costs.
MacDonald and Utano have also testified that Doan purposefully deleted thousands of ArriveCan-related emails as part of a “coverup” by CBSA managers. Doan has denied this, calling the allegation an attempt by government employees to blame him for their own actions, despite “growing evidence that demonstrates I had no relationship with any of the vendors in question.”
