Good morning.
My name is Jennifer Lutfallah. I'm the vice-president of health security and regional operations at the Public Health Agency. I'll just underscore a few points that are contained in my speaking points, which I think you do have.
At the onset of the pandemic, monitoring health measures at the border was a paper-based process. It was a cumbersome one. It was a labour-intensive process. Further exasperating the process was the collection of forms using biohazard protocols. As you will remember, at that point in the pandemic there was suspicion that the virus could live on paper.
PHAC was responsible for collecting, organizing and shipping paper forms that were collected from travellers from all over the country and for digitizing and inputting that information into PHAC's systems. That could take up to about 14 days. We were faced with incomplete and illegible information that was contained on those forms.
In terms of the number of adjustments that were made with the OICs, there were over 80 different OICs written by PHAC as a means to respond to the evolving pandemic. Each time, in most of those circumstances, ArriveCAN needed to be adjusted to respond to those new public health requirements.
I'll finish by stating that without ArriveCAN, Canada's ability to administer the public health measures at the border would have been significantly reduced.
That's it.