I appreciate your latitude, Mr. Chair.
Again, I believe my colleague proved my point by his comments. We want to establish the facts here, and Canadians want to know what the $60 million was spent on. That's what I'm trying to establish here, because it's important as we move forward, especially as we bring witnesses here for questioning, to make sure that our questions are sharp, crisp and based on fact.
I just want to get through this list here, and if I can establish that, we'll move on. Again, I wasn't able to complete that in the last meeting, and I just want to get through it here today.
It was $80,000 to create the original app, the very first initial version, version one. Keep in mind there were 177 versions of this app, as it needed to evolve with the changing situations on the ground.
Service Canada's call centre was stood up, and $6.1 million was the actual cost of that to handle questions related to the app, related to folks who were crossing the border, questions that could be answered by PHAC, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and CBSA.
On data management, there was a lot of data collected. The Conservatives often like to say that this app didn't work, but the app was downloaded 60 million times—60 million times. Imagine the mountain of data that was collected. Therefore, as part of the ArriveCAN app, a data management centre was stood up—again, the cost was $7.9 million. The forecast was $5.2 million; the actual cost was $7.9 million. This was for PHAC and CBSA to collect data, report, monitor and ensure compliance with COVID border measures.
You can imagine all that data, the mountain of data collected, used 60 million times. You can imagine that the data needed to be shared not just with CBSA and PHAC, but almost instantly with every single health agency of every province and territory across the country. There was another related cost to that.
There's also data storage in cloud services—again, for 60 million travellers and 18 million downloads over two years, it was $6.4 million for storing the data securely. We all know the error and terror of data breaches. You can imagine someone crossing the border, providing through the ArriveCAN app personal health information, and the need to have security. There was a need to have that data managed in a secure way and shared with hundreds, if not thousands, of other agency partners across Canada through public health agencies, and the need to do that securely. That's $6.4 million for data storage cloud service.
There's IT support. This is a technical call centre for the app for airlines, airports, travellers. That's $5.4 million.
There's security to ensure it meets Government of Canada standards on cybersecurity. That's $2.4 million.
There's accessibility to make sure that persons with disabilities were able to cross the border, travel and utilize the ArriveCAN app. It was an additional $2.3 million to make sure the app was accessible.
There were program and project management costs—