Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will begin by taking issue with repeated references to my having lied, fibbed or been demonstrably dishonest. I corrected my testimony last October, and I apologized for not remembering all those who attended a Teams meeting three years ago. Mr. Chair, not remembering is not lying.
What more does the committee want from me?
On Tuesday, May 14, it was further implied that as a result of my casual employment status with the CBSA, I was gaining some improper business advantage. The sole purpose of this arrangement is to facilitate my access to my emails and calendar and to get the support required to prepare for a committee appearance.
Let me be clear. No business advantage has been sought or received as a result of this arrangement, and I have always followed all conflict of interest requirements of myself.
I would now like to remind the committee of the exceptional circumstances we found ourselves in during the spring of 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 and personal protective equipment, etc. We had repatriation flights for Canadians returning home and had to manage a myriad of issues with the United States.
Coordinating all of this with our U.S. counterparts and supporting the government in this historic time was my priority. ArriveCAN helped us administer the pandemic border measures, and I relied upon my officials to deal with the procurement details.
With respect to the Auditor General's report, the agency has accepted the findings and put measures in place to ensure that this type of situation doesn't happen again. As it has been stated by the Auditor General, the rules were in place, but unfortunately, it appears they were not always followed.
I would now like to offer the following important context. We were asked by the Public Health Agency to develop the app to replace a paper process so that it could get critical health information and pass it along to provinces in a timely manner. This was not planned for in any way. Certainly, at the beginning, there was no budget and no project plan, or any of the other things we would normally have in place for the development of a tool like this. It was about responding as quickly as possible, and no one could have predicted at that time the dozens of versions that would be required to support the orders in council.
Mobile app expertise is a relatively new field for the government, and while the agency had some nascent capability, it was not sufficient, especially as the app changed frequently and became increasingly complex. While the Auditor General stated very clearly that, at the outset, getting outside support was reasonable, the value for money assessment appears to be partially based on the expectation that we should have hired public servants at less cost to do this work. I find this expectation downplays some important facts.
First of all, these skills are in high demand, and the committee has heard that there is roughly a 30% vacancy in IT positions in the government, so I'm not sure we could have run a successful staffing process.
Second, it takes months to hire somebody.
Finally, with respect to funding, I would remind the committee that the agency absorbed a significant portion of these expenses and there was no ongoing funding. While “make or buy” decisions are made by managers, hiring public servants without an ongoing source of funds is not considered a prudent management practice. To be clear, as the end of the pandemic was starting to come into sight and border volumes were increasing, what we needed was more border services officers, not app developers.
I'd be happy to answer any questions.
