Government Operations Committee on Feb. 22nd, 2024

[Cameron MacDonald]

Well, there were a few in the commercial branch. There were a few others in the travellers branch. We had some corollary projects that we had already started—some no-touch mobile, the e-declaration, some of these things that we were trying to work on—and if you just put it under an ArriveCAN tag line, it was easier to achieve the funding and get the budget you wanted from the finance branch.

Oftentimes what people would do was if they had overall agendas, they would associate it with what was going on in the pandemic and then ArriveCAN. They would get the budget for it, and then they would move it closer to it.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Essentially, they were lying to access taxpayer money by using the tag line “ArriveCAN”. Is that fair to say?

[Cameron MacDonald]

I have to be honest with you: I wouldn't call it a lie. I would call it perhaps an exaggeration.

They would align what they were hoping to achieve as their target with what was happening with ArriveCAN to obtain their outcome. It was a stretch.

There's a very big difference between a stretch and a lie, in my opinion, but I never saw anybody nefariously lie so that they could get access to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Let's say they were loosely coupled.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Mr. MacDonald, I believe in black and white. I don't believe in grey, okay?

If people were accessing taxpayer funds in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the ArriveCAN application and development, they were misleading government officials to access taxpayer funds. I call that misleading. I call that an absolute lie.

How many millions of dollars can you estimate were actually spent on individuals or organizations that you've just described?

[Cameron MacDonald]

I left after the first year. I wouldn't even be able to hazard a guess, but I would say the number would be higher than a million if you totalled it from my vantage point.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Okay.

Is that my time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

That is your time.

Go ahead, Mr. Kusmierczyk.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for your testimony.

The challenge for our committee, of course, from the very beginning, has been to separate what is fact from what is fiction. My grandma use to say, “Eat the fish, spit the bones.” We're trying to separate what are the fish and what are the bones.

I wanted to ask you this. Our Conservative colleagues continue to repeat that this was an $80,000 app that ballooned to $60 million. Is this true?

[Cameron MacDonald]

No, it's not true. As I've said before, the prototype was about $80,000. To get an app was about $400,000.

I really wish Canadians would understand what it costs to actually convert paper into digital in the timelines that we had.

This was included on two different mobile platforms, not to mention the changes. We went all the way to making the app mandatory and making it mandatory to submit it before you came into the country, to collecting sensitive information on a protected cloud, to making sure that it was protected in the first place.

There's no way that this app would have been done in a weekend, as other people have tried to suggest—

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. MacDonald, how much did the app cost, the app itself, as a ballpark figure?

[Antonio Utano]

We've left the agency since then, but as a ballpark figure, I'm going to guess between $12 million to $14 million for the actual app itself.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

That's for the app itself.

[Antonio Utano]

Purely the app.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Is it fair to say, Mr. MacDonald, that the rest of the cost—above, let's say, the $10 million to $12 million—was for the back-end supports, the data storage, the Service Canada call centres, and all the things that make the system run? Is that correct?

[Cameron MacDonald]

Yes, that's 100%.

In fact, in my prior testimony, when I told you that Minh put Deloitte in the penalty box, the data office was trying to go with Deloitte, and Minh told them the exact same thing, so half of those costs moved over to our side, because it was all kind of orientated around cloud and storage and whatnot. We bore a lot of those costs.

I mean, to think about the data pipelines, the security and the ability to do the back-end infrastructure, what we had to do at one point was validate that people had actually crossed the border. If you submitted through ArriveCAN, the data was going to the province and the province was checking on people, but if they never got on the plane, they were wasting their time. We had to do verification checks to make sure that everybody who said they were coming across actually made it across, and then we would send that data over.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Let me ask you question.

Mr. Utano mentioned $12 million, but I heard you say $6 million before. Can you clarify the cost of the app itself?

[Cameron MacDonald]

The overall cost of the first year of operation that I was tracking—I left right after that—was $6.3 million. That included security, hosting fees, validation, independent reviews, the build of the app, etc.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

The deputy leader of the Conservatives stood in the House of Commons and said that the ArriveCAN did no work, and I quote. Is this true? Is this fish or bones?

[Cameron MacDonald]

It's definitely politics.

From our vantage point, I think we can show that there were over 40 million transactions done on the app using the web mobile platform. These were processed and were passed on to PHAC.

I do recall that in the early days there were many studies about the speed at which people could transact, not to mention the cost. I've talked about the cost. I mean, they used to take the piece of paper, put it into a biohazard bag and ship it in a truck to Ottawa so that people could manually enter it into a spreadsheet, so efficiencies, I think, were there. That was why the decision to proceed with an app and make it mandatory was was made by the government.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Okay. I appreciate that.

I have a question for you.

This week, did you speak with Mr. Brock ahead of your testimony here today?

[Cameron MacDonald]

Who are you asking?

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

I'm asking both of you.

[Cameron MacDonald]

Yes, we had a discussion with Mr. Brock.

[Irek Kusmierczyk, Liberal, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. MacDonald, can you tell me what you discussed with Mr. Brock this week, ahead of your testimony here today?

[Cameron MacDonald]

Mr. Brock wanted to know a little bit about what I provided to the OAG. He wanted to know what my thoughts were, and he wanted clarification on the details around the office and who the CIO was. He wanted to confirm his assertion that Minh Doan was the CIO and that John Ossowski was the president at the time.

I don't remember what else we talked about—