A lot have talked about value for money. Actually, I spent the first 10 years of my career as an external auditor, and I'm very aware of value-for-money studies. Value for money is made up of three core functions: economy, efficiency and effectiveness. I do believe that ArriveCAN provided value for money. I don't believe it provided the best value for the taxpayer.
The examples I'll use on that one.... It is very clear to us that in terms of effectiveness, it was providing information to the Public Health Agency so that the agency could enforce quarantine on a timely basis. That was not being provided by the paper-based system, and the Auditor General recognizes that in her report.
In terms of efficiency, it's also clear that the ArriveCAN app was costing around about a dollar per person. We had 60 million travellers processed, and it was around about $60 million in terms of the cost. That compares to three dollars per person with the paper-based system.
Economy is a much more difficult thing to prove, and it also requires judgment and hindsight to look at economy. I do not believe that we necessarily had the best value for the taxpayer, and we learned a lot of lessons there. However, we were in an emergency crisis situation. We overused contractors; I think elsewhere we would take more time and would do less of that. If we hadn't been in a crisis, we would have had a project plan and we'd actually have treated this as a project. We would have had a plan and we would have implemented it.
Therefore, yes, I think it has provided value for money, but not necessarily the best value for the taxpayer.