Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
I want to start by saying that I do believe the committee should look into ArriveCAN because of all the publicity that's come out over the last week.
I don't agree that we need to consider what may be a molehill a mountain and start with six meetings, and drag in five ministers and all of the people who were involved in the disruption contest to try to recreate the app, when that has literally nothing to do with the creation of a complex and secure app.
I think the right way to go about this—because we have to take very seriously Canadians' concerns about what is alleged to be a high cost—is to bring in the four departments that are involved. These four departments can provide their understanding of what happened, the contracts and whether or not the costs were what they are being speculated to have been. Then the committee can decide, once we've heard from the people who were actually involved in these contracts, whether or not we wish to go further and ask for documents to be produced and other witnesses to appear.
Obviously, many people out there don't feel that those who created an app over a weekend were doing something that is consistent with developing this type of an app that the government had millions of people use. So now we want to hear from those people who don't agree. This is really a group of people.... It is on their wish list to hear that the app was too costly.
I don't believe that's a fair way to begin, but I am willing, after two meetings and after we've heard from the departments, to go further if that is what the committee is willing to do because the departments have been unable to satisfy us with what they have come forward with.
I do want to say, though, based on what I've already undertaken to do since I first heard these costs, that I come from this industry. I want to look at what I already know to be misleading information related to the numbers Mr. McCauley cited. Whether the number is $54 million or $52 million, which has been cited, one thing is clear: $25.377 million, or $25,377,165 that is being included in this figure, comes from a competitive contract that was awarded earlier this year, on May 16, 2022. The requirements were for the services of a contractor to maintain and support various CBSA applications, which would include ArriveCAN but also many other IM/IT applications.
This contract was awarded more than two years after ArriveCAN went live. This contract covers many different CBSA services, not just ArriveCAN. Yet somehow this $25.3 million is being lumped into the cost of the development of ArriveCAN. So right away we can see that the number being used is clearly incorrect and highly inaccurate.
What we seem to have found is that the cost to develop the first version of ArriveCAN was approximately $80,000. Subsequently, there were more than 70 updates done to ArriveCAN. The 70 updates were done because, at various times over a two-year period, the regulations changed and travel was different, so ArriveCAN had to be adapted. Those 70 updates over the two-year period cost a total of $8.8 million.
So if you're looking at the cost of development of ArriveCAN, as opposed to multiple other direct and indirect costs of different things—for example, different apps that Public Safety has out there; telephone support lines that handle calls for Canadians seeking help with this app and other apps; the support for accessibility requirements for those with disabilities, meant to enable people who are visually impaired to use the app; the necessary level of security when dealing with a program that handles Canadians' personal information and touches on border security; costs associated with coordinating with provinces, territories and other countries to verify that the provided proof of vaccination was authentic; indirect support, maintenance and upgrades of this and other apps....
All of these numbers are being thrown in and out all together. They don't relate to the costs of the development of the app, which to the best of my understanding at this point, if you're looking at direct costs, was $80,000 for the first version that was launched. It was $8.8 million for the 70 subsequent updates.
I want to say that the officials we would bring in would be much better placed to deal with this than I am. It is important to hear from them, so that they can answer the committee's questions—and I'm sure they will be tough—and Canadians' questions as to the direct and indirect costs of the app.
I do have to say, Mr. Chair, that one thing we need to be careful about, again, is not creating mountains out of molehills or mountains out of hills. At this point, we don't have the necessary information to throw out the numbers that are being thrown out. To the best understanding that I have at this point, they are inaccurate.
I also want to talk about the issue—because I do come from this industry—of a primary contractor versus subcontractors. In this case, there was one primary contractor. The Government of Canada engaged one company to do this work. That company subsequently won the competitive contract that was awarded earlier this year for the $25.3 million that I mentioned, which related to going-forward support and maintenance for this app and many other Public Safety apps. That primary contractor cannot be conflated with the specialized people it used to develop the app.
We contracted with one party. Many companies in this industry don't just keep employees forever. They have certain work that rolls in at certain times. They have a small number of employees who go out and seek work and manage the work, but then they handle specialized subcontractors, usually individuals who are hired to work on the projects that they secure. They go and get the people who better understand the area of the app they're asked to roll out.
For example, here, privacy and international privacy law would be very important to understand because you're getting vaccination proof from many different countries. You need specialists to write the documentation and specialists to link this to the back office of the CBSA for security. You need usability for our people, to be able to have millions of people on different iOSs using the app on different platforms.
Here we had one company that hired 23 people as subcontractors to help it deal on its contract with the Government of Canada. That is not unusual in this industry. Anybody who's involved in this industry will tell you that this is very common. I wanted to deal with that misconception, Mr. Chair.
Finally, I also want to deal with a third misconception, which is that you can create an app over the course of a weekend that is identical to an app that people are creating, like ArriveCAN, which has serious back-office requirements, like password lookup, passport deals and airline flight timetables across borders and jurisdictions.
When you're dealing with an app like this, you have training, documentation and a requirement for language—not just translation, but finely checking the wording to make sure it complies with regulations. You have procurement and licensing. You have deployment. You have parallel development platforms for testing the next version. You have source code repositories. You have backups. You have physical alternatives if the digital one goes down. It has to work in many degraded conditions. You have to have user testing on a wide range of phones and system language settings. This includes testing scanners and the QR codes that you scan on arrival and long pauses while someone finds their flight number while in line.
This is not the same as just copying every interface and screen from the existing app or the navigation fields of every drop-down. It's an entirely different process, and anybody who is involved in the industry will tell you that this is sort of like you've built a house and you added on at some point, with the help of different architects, 70 different rooms, which are the updates to this app, and then you—multiple times—redesigned and rewired the house, and then somebody comes and takes a picture of the house. That's sort of what the hackathon could be compared to, and it's not fair to compare an apple to an orange.
Mr. Chair, just based on what I understand related to how this works, my recommendation again is, let's call in the departments. Let's have the experts from the departments in two meetings—from all four departments—explain to us exactly what they did, exactly how they contracted and exactly what costs are directly related to the development of the app and which are indirect or not associated with the app.
Then, the committee can, at its discretion, based on what we've heard, determine whether further meetings are required, whom we need to hear from and what documents we need to get, but let's do it with the full and clear understanding of what actually happened, versus lots of hypotheses, lots of speculation and lots of numbers being floated around that do not seem to me to be accurate.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.