Thank you.
With the indulgence and the patience of members of the committee, let me highlight quickly what the $54 million was used for. Of that, $80,000 was used to produce the first application of ArriveCAN in April 2020, in a record amount of time. It was a period when we knew that things needed to be done quickly. It was the first time ever that we were closing borders with the rest of the world. We were in an emergency at a time when hundreds of people were dying every day.
There were economic costs in the order of $1 billion per day that were impacting the Canadian economy. Borders were fraught with problems. We needed to bring in medicine and food. We needed trucks to come in easily. We needed the flow of travellers to be done efficiently. That cost $80,000 initially.
Then we had to do more. There were 70-plus releases that cost $8.8 million. There was $7.5 million for the Service Canada call centre, which was absolutely essential for people to call to have information on the situation. There was data management to make sure that data was shared efficiently and safely. Then there were indirect costs to pay for the public servants who had to work hard every day to provide support for the health and safety of Canadians.
There was proof of vaccination credential development that cost $4.6 million, because vaccination proof was essential. If you wanted to travel, you had to have vaccination proof. Then we had to support IT. We had to support the cybersecurity and the flow of that information, which was $2.3 million. We had to make the app accessible to people who needed accessibility in the use of technology, and that was $1.7 million. I could go on and on.
That investment was absolutely needed to save the lives of lots of people and to prevent the additional cost to the economy that would have been incurred if we had not done the type of investment we needed to do.