House Committee Votes Against Questioning Ministers About ArriveCan’s $54 Million Cost

A smartphone set to the opening screen of the ArriveCan app is seen in a file photo. (The Canadian Press/Giordano Ciampini)

MPs on the House of Commons Government Operations and Estimates Committee voted Monday not to question Liberal cabinet ministers about the federal government’s reported $54 million spending on creating and maintaining the ArriveCan app.

Put forward by Conservative MP Kelly McCauley, the motion sought to have the committee spend six meetings questioning officials including Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair, and also contractors hired by the government who were responsible for ArriveCan’s creation and maintenance.

“I think it’s very important we see how this debacle, for lack of better words, happened,” McCauley told the committee.

McCauley’s motion was amended by Liberal MP Anthony Housefather to lower the number of committee meetings on the study from six to two and also scratched the section calling for cabinet ministers to testify.

The committee voted 7–3 in favour of Housefather’s amended motion.

Housefather said the committee shouldn’t make “a molehill a mountain” by holding six meetings and “dragging in five ministers” to testify.

Instead of questioning ministers, the committee will instead question officials from several government departments involved in ArriveCan’s development, such as the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and Public Safety Canada.

‘Kick in the Face’

McCauley told The Epoch Times that the amended motion “robs us of any transparency in this debacle.”

“It’s another kick in the face to taxpayers who have to cough up all this money for a relatively small app,” he said.

McCauley’s unamended motion also called for testimony from two individuals from Canadian tech companies TribalScale and Lazer Technologies, which each recreated the ArriveCan app in a single weekend with the goal of showing that the federal government overspent on it.

TribalScale’s founder, Sheetal Jaitly, said the government could’ve created the app for less than $1 million.

“Us here at TribalScale have built end-to-end apps with like 15 different integration points on the back end, video streaming—I mean, think of the biggest media apps in the world that are so much more complex than ArriveCan—for less than a million dollars,” Jaitly told The Epoch Times in an interview.

Responding to criticism of the app’s cost, CBSA said ArriveCan’s $54 million price tag included more than its creation.

“The $54M we expect to have spent by March 31, 2023, was not just budgeted and spent on the creation and launch of the app itself, which costed $80K to launch in April 2020, but also on all the necessary work to operate, maintain and upgrade the app over the last two years,” CBSA spokesperson Sandra Boudreau said in an email. 

The CBSA says the government spent only $80,000 to create ArriveCan, but then spent an additional $8.8 million for 70 subsequent “releases” of the app.

The federal government also spent $4.9 million “in indirect costs associated with the project, including employee benefits, accommodations, and payments to other government departments,” according to the CBSA.

The government also says it spent just under $3 million to meet all official cybersecurity regulations.

However, Jaitley said programming these regulations into the app shouldn’t have even brought the cost over $1 million.

“We build banking apps, we build health care apps, we build applications that are in highly governance and regulatory spaces,” Jaitley said, adding that these apps have the same cybersecurity regulations that ArriveCan would’ve had.

“We work with them,” Jaitley said, referring to these regulations. “We execute on them without having that [cost] being raised.”

“I think even if this was a bloated project with a lot of bureaucracy and consultants from multiple vendors coming at it and everything like that, it should’ve still cost less than a million dollars.”