Auditor-General Karen Hogan listens to a question from a reporter about her offices report on the ArriveCAN app during a news conference in Ottawa, on Feb. 12.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
When the Auditor-General’s news release starts with words “glaring disregard,” you know it won’t be good news for the government.
Still, it was hard to imagine that there would be too many more revelations in Karen Hogan’s value-for-money report on the ArriveCan app.
Yet somehow there was still a litany of distressing reading about the way the Canada Border Services Agency handled it all – a compendium of rules broken, records missing and shifty contracting.
It was already known that GC Strategies, the two-person company that did no actual IT work but hired subcontractors and tacked on a 15-to-30-per-cent commission, had initially received non-competitive contracts for the work.
But the Auditor-General found those sole-source contracts were replaced by a supposedly competitive contract, worth as much as $25-million, that gave the inside track to GC Strategies.
The company actually helped develop the process that set “extremely narrow” criteria for bidders that probably excluded competitors – and only GC Strategies submitted a proposal.
But even with all that, the ArriveCan mystery remains.
There is now quite a bit of detail about how contracting rules were broken and money was wasted and a whole lot more about how records were not kept and there’s no record of why contractors were chosen or how money was spent or even how much it all cost. Ms. Hogan’s team estimated that ArriveCan cost $59.5-million, but she said it was impossible to know for sure.
But why did this little pandemic-era traveller-information app turn into a money-dripping shemozzle? Ms. Hogan couldn’t answer.
Her report raised questions about relationships between public servants and suppliers, saying there was no evidence that public servants involved in the project reported that contractors had invited them to dinner and other activities, as they were required to do. That raised the risk of potential conflict of interest, she concluded.
But she did not look further into such conduct, for fear of interfering with an internal government investigation and an RCMP criminal probe. Two former Canada Border Services Agency bureaucrats, Cameron MacDonald and Antonio Utano, have been suspended without pay pending those investigations.
Ms. Hogan’s value-for-money audit amplified one thing we basically knew: ArriveCan was a money pit. It didn’t tell us if that was because of incompetence or corruption.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called it corruption – but he doesn’t have any evidence, either.
What we do know, however, is that the whole ArriveCan app project was enveloped in the kind of black hole of accountability that provides fertile ground for corruption.
The auditors could not find who chose GC Strategies – or why – for a non-competitive contract. They often could not find records of what was spent. Invoices did not say what work they were for, yet officials paid them. The CBSA consistently paid unnecessarily high fees for experienced IT workers but did not always get them. And the auditors found CBSA gave GC Strategies an advantage in bidding for a $25-million contract.
The question it all raised is whether the “glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices” that Ms. Hogan found was a deliberate disregard. Just how can so many basic rules be ignored in one project?
Ms. Hogan didn’t answer. Canadians still don’t have an answer.
The Liberal government wants to move on, but ArriveCan’s mystery is too murky a thing to move away from.
So Ms. Hogan’s report left Liberal cabinet ministers in the comical position of promising better contracting practices in the future – you know, like writing things down, or only paying invoices that describe the work done, or not letting a contractor write the terms for bidding. That surely doesn’t require a whole new book of rules so much as not letting people break every rule in the book.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc outlined the standard government response to a critical auditor-general’s report – accepting that mistakes were made without saying by whom and promising to implement all of the report’s recommendations.
But even Ms. Hogan had remarked that her recommendations were so basic and obvious that they shouldn’t even be necessary.
The government’s assurances that it will fix things so something like this can never happen again still have one big element missing: It still can’t tell us what actually happened with ArriveCan.