Evidence of meeting #45 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was digital.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
I call the meeting to order.
Welcome, everyone. We're going to get going.
This is meeting number 45 of House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, also known as the mighty OGGO.
We have a shortened meeting today. We are going to do two 45-minute sessions. The first is with our witnesses, Mr. Ossowski and Mr. Manji, and Mr. Manji is appearing virtually.
Mr. Clerk, can I just confirm that Mr. Manji and everyone appearing virtually have passed the sound test?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Wonderful.
We'll start with two five-minute opening rounds.
Mr. Ossowski, could you start us off for five minutes, please? We are short on time, so I'll keep you right at five minutes.
John Ossowski As an Individual
Thank you.
Good afternoon. I'm John Ossowski. Up until June 24 of this year, I was the president of the Canada Border Services Agency.
As I'm appearing before you today—
Bloc
Conservative
As an Individual
I am John Ossowski. Up until June 24 of this year, I was the president of the Canada Border Services Agency.
As I am appearing before you today as a private citizen, I will remind members of the committee that I no longer have access to any departmental documents on contracts or financials for the ArriveCAN application. I note that you have already met with departmental officials, who have provided this information.
I think it's important for the committee to recall the operating environment of April 2020, when we received a call from colleagues at the Public Health Agency to develop an application for them that collected traveller and health information. By the end of April 2020, 100,000 people around the world had already died of COVID-19, and infections in Canada were at around 30,000 cases. This was a time of great uncertainty, and the need was urgent.
Despite restrictions on entry at that time, in April 2020 the number of travellers who were exempt and arriving by air was around 70,000, compared to the close to 3.2 million who arrived in April the year before. Up until this point in time, travellers had to provide verbal responses to the CBSA officers making sure they were compliant with the myriad rules being established through various orders in council. The result, when combined with the need for social distancing, made airports chaotic scenes. Paper was being distributed to travellers to capture contact tracing and quarantine plan information. These were critical data points for health officials, both federally and provincially, who were desperate to know who was coming in and where they were going.
In the early days, the CBSA collected huge volumes of paper, and the government was challenged to convert this information into usable, shareable electronic data—a process that took well over seven days. It was critical for federal and provincial health officials to have timely access to this data in order to slow the spread of the virus. In addition, I recall the average passage time per traveller was up to seven minutes long. You might also recall that in those first few months of the pandemic, there were concerns the virus could live on paper for extended periods of time.
Needless to say, it was clear to everyone that we urgently needed a scalable digital solution that would help the travelling public as well as health care authorities.
Fortunately, the CBSA had some initial IT experience with mobile apps in the border context, as we had been looking for some time, along with our Border Five colleagues, at similar approaches to help speed up the border processing of travellers. However, the agency needed outside support for the app's quick evolution. As health measures continually adjusted, so did the application, with over 70 iterations being developed and released for Apple, Android and web-based platforms. Many of these were fundamental changes that required significant recoding.
As the Public Health Agency was the business owner of ArriveCAN, we took direction from them for requirements. The CBSA passed along all data collected for them to share with the provinces, which were desperate for this information. Over time, the CBSA built in new aspects that helped validate the proof of vaccine certificates of foreign nationals using AI tools, as well as the ability to validate, in real time, critical provincial QR codes to make it easier for Canadian citizens. We had a high degree of confidence in their certificates.
Because the app was linked with passports, provincial vaccination credentials and CBSA systems in real time, many travellers were never asked any questions about ArriveCAN or their health care status. Instead, for the roughly 30 million submissions for, I'm told, 60 million travellers, the border service officer simply saw a green check mark on the screen advising them that all border health requirements had been met, because the app provided and validated the information in advance. This allowed the officer to focus on the over 100 pieces of legislation and regulations they administer on behalf of other departments.
Eventually, the same approach was applied on the commercial side. We built in a feature for frequent crossers that saved their profiles so that they didn't have to refill the entire set of questions for each passage. Each iteration of the app required careful consideration of hundreds of scenarios, regression testing, accessibility, security, approvals by the app stores and linkages with many departmental systems.
As I mentioned earlier, along with our Border Five colleagues, we were looking at technologies like ArriveCAN to better manage risk and improve throughput at airports, something the air industry had been requesting for quite some time. Indeed, even though the app is voluntary, it is still being used every day to complete advance declarations to further speed up passenger processing times at the airport.
Budget 2021 provided the CBSA funding for traveller modernization. I would encourage members of the committee to look at a short video about it on the CBSA website. I have given the clerk of the committee the link to this video.
In closing, I would like to say that I am incredibly proud of how the agency responded to the call for help from our Public Health Agency colleagues, provinces and territories, as well as the air industry. I am excited that technologies like this will be used to continue to improve the traveller experience while keeping our borders safe and secure.
Mr. Chair, I am happy to answer any questions from the committee.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thank you.
Mr. Manji, we have you for five minutes for an opening statement.
Zain Manji Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Lazer Technologies
Good afternoon, and thank you for having me here today.
My name is Zain Manji. I'm one of the co-founders of Lazer Technologies.
Lazer is an engineering and design studio that helps fast-growing start-ups as well as large and established organizations to build and ship amazing digital products and experiences. Some of the companies we have helped include Shopify, RBC, The Weather Network, Canadian Tire, LoyaltyOne and many more. The projects we have worked on span a number of industries including health care, e-commerce, finance, crypto, media, gaming and more.
When we work with companies, we focus primarily on the design and engineering execution of their products. This includes items such as product discovery; UI/UX discovery, or user interface/user experience discovery; wireframing; high-fidelity designs; architecture designs; product road map planning; engineering execution, such as back-end infrastructure; front-end engineering; DevOps and more. We also do go-to-market strategies.
In addition to helping these great companies, we also build our own products in-house. One of the products we built was a COVID-19 vaccine-finder chatbot, which someone could use to text a phone number with a postal code and that phone number would text them back with the closest three to five vaccine locations for that postal code. Through this product, we helped over 150,000 Canadians find vaccine locations across Canada.
Personally, I have been in technology for over 10 years as a software engineer and a product manager. Prior to Lazer, I worked at Google, Yelp and Instagram. I completed my Bachelor of Arts and Science degree at the University of Toronto in computer science and economics.
I believe I was invited here today because after reading about the dollar figure associated with the ArriveCAN app development through a Globe and Mail report, we made a cloned version of the ArriveCAN app's front end in two days. We did this because we wanted to shed light on how quickly the front end of an app like this could be made and how capital-efficient it could be if the right parties were engaged in the process.
We believed that by building the front-end experience of the app, we could open up the discussion as to how to improve the way Canada produces new technology. Personally, being deeply embedded in Canada's tech community, we also wanted to show that Canada has exceptional talent that is eager and excited to help out our country if need be.
We have already seen examples of this two years ago, first when Shopify engineers created a COVID-tracing app for free, and then a year ago when we created a COVID vaccine-finder app for free.
Personally, I love that the government is placing more of a focus on becoming digital-first. I hope we can continue to improve the transparency and efficiency around the development of Canadian digital projects. I also hope that we can work together towards creating the better structures, teams, resources, tools and frameworks that are needed to build the best technology for Canadians.
At the end of the day, we would love for Canada to become the most proficient when it comes to new technology and be a prime example of a country that develops impactful technology well.
Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thank you very much for being rather concise.
Mr. Barrett, we'll start with you for six minutes, please.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Thanks, Chair, and thanks to the witnesses for being here today.
Mr. Ossowski, I'm going to move through a couple of questions as quickly as we can. I'm going to be referring primarily to your role when you worked for CBSA.
Did you have contact with Kristian Firth of GC Strategies in that role?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Do you know who in your reporting structure would have dealt with Mr. Firth, if there were interactions?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Okay.
Do you or did you have a working relationship with Marc Brouillard?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
I believe he's the chief information officer.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Did you have any contact with respect to this ArriveCAN project specifically?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Did you have any conversations with respect to GC Strategies?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
To the best of your recollection, when did you first brief the minister on ArriveCAN?
As an Individual
I'd have to go back. I'm sure the department has records on this, but it would have been in early April, after we got the call from the Public Health Agency and asked for the development of the app. That call came fairly quickly, given the volumes of paper.
We would have provided some advice. We had an idea that we could do what I'll call a “quick and dirty app” to start capturing this basic kind of information. We would have advised them to have this approach.
I would reiterate that all of these business requirements would have come from the Public Health Agency. We were essentially the general contractor for this project.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Did you discuss contracts with the minister during those briefings?
