Thank you for the opportunity to appear today.
We are approaching four years since these events unfolded, so I'm relying on the best of my recollection, on what the agency has provided me, and on my review of the testimony from previous meetings.
I'd like to take this opportunity to clearly lay out the facts as I remember them. If the committee has other relevant information it wishes to share with me, I hope it will do so. I'd be happy to review it and get back to you.
I'm going to begin by reminding the committee of the exceptional circumstances we found ourselves in during March 2020. We were shutting down the largest unprotected border in the world while trying to ensure that critical supply chains remained functional for the essential trade of food, medicine, PPE, etc. We had repatriation flights for Canadians returning home, and we had to manage immigration issues with the United States. We had to manage fear and uncertainty in our own workforce while ensuring the integrity of our frontline operations. Coordinating this with our U.S. counterparts and supporting the government in this historic time were my priorities.
ArriveCAN helped us administer the pandemic border measures, but I relied on my officials to deal with the procurement details.
I will now turn to a few points made by Mr. MacDonald during his testimony regarding Deloitte and the vendor selection process.
With respect to comments he made about the CARM contract with Deloitte, I have reviewed my business records and offer the following context.
On March 14, I received an email from the senior partner at Deloitte offering to help in any way they could with our challenges during the pandemic. I immediately passed this along to several of my vice-presidents. The vice-president of the CARM project replied that while Deloitte had cleared people who knew our systems, they were already stretched on the CARM project. This is the best evidence of the true state of play with Deloitte—clearly not a penalty-box issue. I will emphasize that all of my business records clearly show a cordial and business-like relationship with Deloitte. All I can say is that we were all working with Deloitte to make sure that the CARM project was a success.
With respect to Mr. MacDonald's statement that VPs were told not to use Deloitte, I have no recollection of providing this direction. I asked a few members of my former executive team if they recalled this, and they don't. In fact, one of them said that they would have objected if I had said that, as Deloitte was working on other contracts within the agency at the time and there were no issues. My understanding is that Deloitte has continued to work with the agency. To be clear, a deputy minister has no authority to ban a firm unilaterally. No one was in the penalty box, and there's no evidence to support this.
I'll now focus on a few days following the request from the Public Health Agency that I received on March 22, 2020, to look into an app. I immediately forwarded this request to my CIO, Mr. Doan, as well as to my vice-president of the travellers branch. Four days later, on March 26, Mr. Doan shared simple mock-ups of what the application could look like with me and my executive vice-president.
The committee will have seen two relevant meetings in my calendar at this time. One was on March 26 at 10 a.m.; I had a teleconference with Mr. Doan and my executive vice-president where he showed us the mock-ups. At 10:43 a.m. that same day, I forwarded those simple mock-ups to the DM of health and to the president of the Public Health Agency. On March 27, we had another meeting to discuss issues raised by those same DMs. To be clear, at this point, no one could have envisioned how many versions and releases of the app there would be, nor its cost.
I have reviewed my business records during this time period, and I have not been able to find any emails from Mr. Doan or anyone else regarding the vendor selection options developed by Mr. MacDonald or Mr. Utano. The agency has confirmed this to me as well.
I have no recollection of being asked for my opinion on Deloitte or any other potential vendor as part of the ArriveCAN procurement. Speed was of the essence as airports were slowing down with the paper-based process and provinces were demanding better data. I was relying on my vice-presidents for their best advice on how to manage the situation.
While I haven't seen any of the documents involved, Mr. Doan's testimony states that he was provided a choice between a fully outsourced Deloitte solution or an option to augment our existing capabilities. Mr. Doan testified that, for a variety of reasons—such as using the CBSA cloud versus a private sector cloud, speed and agility—the staff augmentation was the preferred approach. This choice makes sense to me, especially considering the legal and privacy issues involved.
Given what I have stated, the choice appears to be a rational, business-based decision and has nothing to do with the CARM project. If the committee has different information in its possession, then I'd be happy to review it.
To this day, I remain exceptionally proud of how the CBSA responded to the pandemic, and I hope that these current matters don't diminish the efforts of the many thousands of CBSA employees who served Canada during this unprecedented event.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
