Key Figure in ArriveCan Scandal Says Emails Were Deleted by Mistake

Former Canada Border Services Agency employee Minh Doan. The House of Commons/Screenshot via The Epoch Times

A key figure at the centre of the ArriveCan controversy has told the Commons Public Accounts Committee that the deletion of ArriveCan emails was an accident due to corruption of files on his computer.

“I needed to change my laptop because the battery on my current one was failing. When transferring files from my old computer to my new one, [they got] corrupted and emails were lost,” former Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) employee Minh Doan testified on June 5.

Mr. Doan was the vice president and chief information officer of the CBSA when the agency launched ArriveCAN in 2020. The application, which was used to track the COVID-19 vaccination status of travellers entering Canada, ended up costing an estimated $59.5 million to develop.

Auditor General Karen Hogan said in a Feb. 13 report that bookkeeping around ArriveCan was the worst she had ever seen, and that Canadians did not receive value for the app. The RCMP has been conducting an investigation of GC Strategies, one of the contractors for the app.

Mr. Doan told MPs on the Public Accounts Committee that while he had accidentally deleted around 1,700 emails from his laptop, Shared Services Canada retained copies of them on its servers. “Neither I nor anyone else can delete other individuals’ copies of emails. The loss of emails from my laptop would not result in them no longer existing anywhere else,” he said.

CBSA vice president and chief information officer Darryl Vleeming previously told the Public Accounts Committee that it was “surprisingly easy” to delete emails without a trace, as they are stored on Shared Services Canada servers for 30 days after initial deletion, after which they are permanently erased.

Mr. Doan’s explanation brought expressions of disbelief from Conservative MPs on the committee.

Conservative MP Michael Cooper said Mr. Doan’s explanation around the emails was “incredible” and convenient. “How is it that you’re both the victim of something that’s exceedingly rare, but also the beneficiary of something that’s exceedingly helpful for you?” he asked.

Mr. Doan said that corrupt PST files were “fairly common,” and said he did not know “how having my files corrupted would be convenient to me in any way.”

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis asked Mr. Doan how MPs could “believe credibly that you were just trying to save the folks in IT some time as a senior manager, and oh, something just happened to go wrong?”

Liberal MP Majid Jowhari questioned why Mr. Doan hadn’t asked the IT department for a new laptop instead of attempting to transfer the files over himself. Mr. Doan responded that IT services are “extremely busy” helping CBSA executives, “so any time I could, on my own, do what I believed to be a fairly straightforward thing such as a file transfer, I would do that.”

Remaining Questions Over Who Chose GC Strategies

As part of several investigations into ArriveCan, a central question has been who at the CBSA decided to hire GC Strategies to build the app. The small company outsourced the contract work for the app to six other companies, keeping a commission of between 15 and 30 percent.

It is thought that Mr. Doan’s emails could have contained documents relevant to an Access to Information Request related to the agency’s interactions with GC Strategies. Mr. Doan previously testified in November 2023 that he was not responsible for choosing the company, but that he was given two options for the project and selected a specific direction, but GC Strategies was not specifically mentioned in the options.

Mr. Doan presented a similar story when testifying on June 6, claiming he had “picked a strategic direction to use in-house resources with staff augmentation,” but did “not decide on a company.”

However, CBSA’s former director Cameron MacDonald previously testified before the committee that Mr. Doan was responsible for choosing GC Strategies, and that he threatened to blame Mr. MacDonald for the decision during a phone call. Mr. MacDonald said Mr. Doan had chosen that company after being told he could not use Deloitte.

In April, KPMG partner and national service leader in cybersecurity Hartaj Nijjar testified before the committee that the company was contacted by former CBSA official Antonio Utano, who encouraged it to work under GC Strategies on the app. Mr. Utano and Mr. MacDonald were both suspended from their government positions without pay in January over allegations of misconduct related to ArriveCan.