Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you about ArriveCAN today.
Our firm, Digital Public, does work focused on digital transformation, both in government and more broadly. I'm sharing thoughts today based on my experience working with software as a product manager and as a facilitator to support democratic process.
There is a long list of what went wrong with ArriveCAN. At the top of the list is the inequity in public service delivery it created and the damage it did to public trust in government, particularly during a public health crisis.
We can discuss the specific details of what went wrong together, but for the purpose of these short remarks, I'm going to share three proposals that may help us avoid replicating our ArriveCAN mistakes. The recommendations fall under three headings—equity, sovereignty, and democratic accountability and oversight.
First, on equity, most importantly, ArriveCAN should always have been a voluntary app. It never should have been mandatory. The first proposal here is to implement mandatory redundancy in our digital public service delivery. What this means is that if there is a digital way to access a public service, there always, including in emergencies, needs to be a non-digital mode as well, one that is properly staffed and delivers just as high quality and experience.
Two very telling things happened over the course of ArriveCAN that illustrate why we need this kind of policy as a gating mechanism to force equity in public service delivery.
First, the government roundly ignored the federal, provincial and territorial privacy commissioners who stated clearly that technology used during the pandemic must be voluntary in order not to destroy public trust. To quote from the 2020 joint statement by federal, provincial and territorial privacy commissioners entitled “Supporting public health, building public trust”:
Consent and trust: The use of apps must be voluntary. This will be indispensable to building public trust. Trust will also require that governments demonstrate a high level of transparency and accountability.
Second, the public service should have had a deep and clear knowledge of the access and digital literacy issues, the discomfort and the fear that mandating this technology created for people in this country. This is about public service ethics. Yes, we were operating under emergency powers. If anything, this should have increased the care taken to support comfortable human experiences. Instead, the moment was used to accelerate an underlying desire to modernize the border.
Our work of democracy is easing access to each other's care. The mandatory nature of this app did the opposite. It created barriers. It devalued the work and possibility of the public service.
My second proposal is on sovereignty: Do not deliver public services through apps and app stores, full stop. We should not be building the delivery of public services with and through digital infrastructure that we don't own or control. This should be a non-starter.
The app stores are for consumer products. They are not for government service delivery. There is also a significant issue with moving the work done by the public service away from physical interactions and into private devices done in private places.
One of the problems with honing in on procurement is that we talk about purchasing. We skip over what it would mean to build our digital infrastructure, which is a conversation we need to have more of.
Finally, on democratic accountability and oversight, a third proposal is to create an independent public advisory board to oversee ArriveCAN's ongoing development and use. This will help address transparency problems, open the code, explain where the data goes and how it's used, and engage with communities on changes and updates to the app. The app's development is funded into next fall, so there's lots of time to set up an improved oversight mechanism.
In closing, the development, design, launch and implementation of ArriveCAN was rife with digital governance issues and errors. We can do better in the future, but only if we understand, acknowledge, and accept the harm caused by ArriveCAN and the lack of defensible public health rationale to do so.
Thank you. I'm happy to discuss any and all of this further.