Public Accounts committee  For the purposes of the administration of the public service.

Public Accounts committee  There was close collaboration between the Public Health Agency and the Canada Border Services Agency in the elaboration and development of ArriveCAN. However, there was no formal project governance put in place, and no documentation of those decisions, which the Auditor General has pointed out.

Public Accounts committee  I would say that the nature of the meetings at that time in March 2020 were focused on the significant time pressure to develop an app that would allow the border to permit the flow of critical people and goods. Therefore, the operational outcomes were the overriding subject of conversation and the necessity of layering the public health measures.

Public Accounts committee  The Public Health Agency functions as part of the health portfolio.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that's one of the functions.

Public Accounts committee  The role of the Public Health Agency was to help to inform the development of the app and the public health objectives of its development, namely to provide an additional tool for Canadians to have information to inform their risk management related to COVID-19. The evolution of the virus and the evolution of the testing methods being used in provinces and territories meant that once PCR testing was no longer the main method of informing Canadians that they had tested positive for COVID, the app became of less utility—

Public Accounts committee  We've already acknowledged that it would have been appropriate, and certainly, in the future, we will be putting in place formal governance. What I can say is—

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for your question. I can assure you that there was no contract between the Public Health Agency of Canada and GC Strategies.

Public Accounts committee  I can answer that. The COVID Alert app was developed as a tool to help limit the spread of COVID-19. It was downloaded about 6.9 million times. More than 58,000 users entered keys into that app. The idea was that it would provide an extra tool to allow Canadians to identify when they might have been exposed to COVID-19.

Public Accounts committee  Absolutely. I'm sorry. The COVID Alert app was a tool to help Canadians monitor any potential contact or exposure that they had. It supplemented the contact tracing that provinces, territories and local public health had put in place. The way the app worked was that one-time keys were generated when people tested positive through a PCR test.

Public Accounts committee  The Public Health Agency was not responsible for the COVID Alert app, although we assisted in the development of the public health rationale and its functioning. The COVID Alert app was, I believe, initially developed by the Treasury Board Secretariat in conjunction with the Canadian digital service.

Public Accounts committee  I believe my CBSA counterparts have commented on this. A digital border is very important for the flow of people and goods in a modern economy. CBSA had indeed been considering the need to move to further digital processing at the border. With the layering of public health measures and the importance of the border in delaying the entry of variants and monitoring the flow of travellers and of COVID-19 into Canada, it was really critical that those submissions be done in a digital way.

Public Accounts committee  This was an unprecedented time. The speed of the response was really critical, given the speed at which the virus moves and the need to facilitate essential travel. The Public Health Agency of Canada did not have the expertise to develop an app of this nature. For this reason, it asked the Canada Border Services Agency to work on the development of the application while the Public Health Agency focused on the analysis of the measures that needed to be put in place, the implementation of the Quarantine Act and the orders in council that really stood up the requirements needed to operate at the border.

Public Accounts committee  It is clear that while this was an emergency that pointed to the need for us to rapidly develop tools that we did not have, having in place the necessary governance with clear roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, project budgets and gating would have been essential to ensuring that there was adequate oversight of the development of this application from the outset.

Public Accounts committee  The contracts that were put in place were administered by the department—