Good afternoon to the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to provide information on Donna Cona's involvement with ArriveCAN.
My name is John Bernard, and I am the CEO of Donna Cona. I am here with my business partner and the president of Donna Cona, Barry Dowdall. I am a status first nation person from the Madawaska Maliseet First Nation in New Brunswick. Although I grew up on reserve, I moved off reserve shortly after I graduated from university. After moving around to a number of cities, I landed in Ottawa in the late 1980s, working for a few federal government departments: Fisheries and Oceans, Health and Welfare Canada, and finally, as it was called back then, Indian Affairs.
In 1990, I resigned from the federal government and became an IT consultant working with Systems Interface. Right from the start, I began encouraging Systems Interface to hire aboriginal employees and pursue contracts within the Department of Indian Affairs. Unfortunately, it wasn't until 1996, with the introduction of the PSAB program, that any recognition was given to hiring aboriginals. Part of the PSAB requirement was that a company had to be owned and/or majority controlled by an aboriginal. It was at this time in 1996 that we spun off Donna Cona as 51% owned by me and 49% owned by Systems Interface. Today I own 100% of Donna Cona and continue to hire and promote aboriginals as much as possible.
Donna Cona provides information technology and information management professional services to several clients, one of them being the federal government. We also provide a crisis counselling service for all indigenous, first nations, Métis and Inuit people of Canada. This service runs 24-7 and handles about 50,000 contacts per year through phone and online chat. We are international standards—ISO—certified, and for the past six years we've been named one of Canada's best-managed companies.
Donna Cona has hired many indigenous employees over the last two and a half decades. Just as importantly, we've sponsored and supported indigenous associations, communities and students over the last 28 years. Today, Donna Cona has 84 employees. There are 18 indigenous staff and 58 women. We also use many incorporated subcontractors to supply our client delivery services. Thirty per cent of our overall revenue comes from PSIB set-asides. It was once PSAB, but today it's called PSIB.
The success of Donna Cona and technology afforded me the ability to experience my dream of moving back into my community and investing in businesses in my first nation. In 2007, I built an entertainment centre on the Madawaska Maliseet First Nation that eventually included a 10,000-square-foot events venue, as well as multiple restaurants and electronic gaming. Since 2008, these businesses have returned over $20 million to my community and close to $10 million to the New Brunswick government. With this business, along with a number of other businesses that I own on the reserve, I employ close to 150 employees from the local town and my first nation.
As today's agenda is to talk about the CBSA ArriveCAN project, the following has been our involvement with the CBSA, and in particular ArriveCAN. We have three supply arrangements with the CBSA that were competitively procured in July 2019 and September 2020. One is for enterprise data warehouse IT services, and the other is for travellers' projects. Neither of the supply arrangements, nor any of the TAs, mentions ArriveCAN.
With regard to the Auditor General's report, we disagree that we provided $3 million for ArriveCAN. We found, through the time sheets, activities for only the two contracts and determined that approximately $500,000 of the cloud infrastructure development was provided in support of ArriveCAN. We worked with CBSA staff to design cloud data pipelines on AWS cloud services to implement the Public Health Agency COVID-19 analytics architecture in AWS and to provide business intelligence and tech support for reporting purposes.
Once again, thank you for the opportunity to assist the committee in its efforts.