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
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Okay. It would be the VP or DG at CBSA.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Did you consult Treasury Board with respect to this program at any point?
As an Individual
Treasury Board was involved in these calls all the time, intermittently. They were aware that we were taking this approach to replace the paper in the early days, and they were aware as well in terms of the timing of the orders in council, because those would have been approved with Treasury Board ministers, and they were aware of the timing issues around the application.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Were you involved in the consultations on the contracts themselves?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Okay.
PSPC would have signed off on the contracts.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Okay. At what level would that...?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Did you ever meet any resistance from anyone in the public service when you were implementing ArriveCAN?
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
Did you hear it from members of the CBSA?
As an Individual
I think Mr. Johns referred to the union's wanting to have more consultation, but as I mentioned, that was simply not possible in the early days.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
With my last 15 seconds, Mr. Manji, could this app have been made for less money, and could it have been made faster?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
That's our time.
We have Mr. Jowhari for five minutes.
Mr. Johns, unfortunately, I misinformed you. After Mr. Jowhari, we're done with this round of witnesses.
December 8th, 2022 / 4:35 p.m.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Ossowski, for your work and your team's work.
I'm going to ask a bunch of rapid questions. I'm trying to get to a couple of points.
I understand that the development cost of the application was roughly around $8.8 million. The first version was within a couple of months, and it came to about $80,000. There were 80 orders in council, or OICs, and 70 rounds of updates to that application within 18 months. Are those numbers facts, sir?
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Let's talk about the speed with which this application was developed. We'll get to the complexities in a minute.
If I take 18 months, and I either use 21 working days or 30 working days divided by the 70 versions that were developed, if I'm using 30 days, it will end up about seven days per version that was developed, and if I use 21 days, it will be five and a half business days to develop.
In your testimony, in your response to one of my colleagues, you talked about each version, with the complexity and with the complete testing, taking about a week. Am I right to say that, sir?
As an Individual
It went in fits and starts, but on average, you could say that, yes.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
We developed 70 very complex, totally integrated versions and we made sure that they met the requirements that the Government of Canada or Health Canada put out to ensure the safety of people. Each version took seven days. Do you think we could have done that application under any circumstances faster than seven days or faster than 5.5 days?
I've been in the industry for 21 years, and I'd like to challenge the comment that this application could have been developed much faster than five business days or seven full days, sir.
As an Individual
I completely agree with you, and I think you have to build in the cyber-vulnerability testing we did, the regression testing we did, the back end, the call centres and getting briefings to the frontline officers so they knew what changes were happening with various orders in council. This was literally a 24-7 operation, and is still a 24-7 operation.