Auditor general Karen Hogan estimated that the Canada Border Services Agency spent $59.5 million on the app
OTTAWA – In a damning report released Monday, Canada’s auditor general found government departments kept weak records and had poor financial controls over the ArriveCan app, allowing costs to spiral and leaving even auditors unsure how much developing the app had cost taxpayers.
Auditor General Karen Hogan estimated that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) spent $59.5 million on the border customs app, but said she can’t be sure.
Advertisement 2
Article content
Article content
“The Canada Border Services Agency’s documentation, financial records, and controls were so poor that we were unable to determine the precise cost of the ArriveCAN application. Using the information that was available, we estimated the cost at approximately $59.5 million,” she said in her report.
Speaking at a House of Commons committee Monday, Hogan said she was “deeply concerned” by what the audit didn’t find, such as records to accurately show how the funds were spent on what, who did the work and how or why contracting decisions were made.
“That paper trail should have existed,” she told MPs. “Overall, this audit shows a glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices.”
ArriveCan was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic after Canada had imposed vaccine and quarantine rules for travellers entering Canada. It was meant to allow travellers to share information about their vaccination status as they crossed into Canada, speeding up border controls. Hogan found 18 per cent of the invoices connected to the project couldn’t be confirmed to be related to it.
Advertisement 3
Article content
Ultimately, the Auditor General’s Office came to the conclusion that the federal government paid “too much” for this application and that the public service should have exercised due diligence for public funds even if it was trying to act quickly during a public health emergency.
Hogan’s report adds to one from the government’s procurement ombudsman, which found similar major problems with the contract. The CBSA is doing its own internal investigation and has already referred some issues relating to employees and contractors to the RCMP.
“An emergency was not an excuse to throw out the window the basic rules that the public service normally follows. I would expect better from the public service, and I have seen the public service do better,” said Hogan.
In addition to the sloppy financial controls, Hogan found the app was not tested properly, as 177 different versions of the app were rolled out between April 2020 and October 2022. Among those were 25 major updates and nearly half of those were released without any testing.
“We found little documentation showing that the Canada Border Services Agency completed testing prior to releasing new versions of ArriveCAN,” she said.
First Reading
Article content
Advertisement 4
Article content
The lack of tests led to one version of the app, released in late June 2022, wrongly sending more than 10,000 people into a 14-day quarantine.
Hogan said so much of the standard procedures a government should follow were not being followed in this case, that she can’t say with certainty what ministers were told about the project and the costs that kept rising.
“It is difficult for me to tell you whether or not ministers were made aware, because there is nothing kept on file and we would have expected that the public service would document all of that,” she said.
Hogan said she has looked at many other pandemic contracts, where public servants had to move quickly, but those contracts still managed to follow basic procedures.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work around pandemic spending and contracting and while we’ve seen opportunities for improvement, things that could have been done better, nothing as glaring as what we’re seeing here,” she said.
Hogan said she found that non-competitive contracts were extended over and over without any competitive bidding process. She found that GC Strategies was awarded the first contract to develop ArriveCan despite not having put in a proposal. MPs studying the issue at committee have heard that GC Strategies subsequently subcontracted out all the development of the app to other firms.
Advertisement 5
Article content
“The Canada Border Services Agency informed us that GC Strategies was awarded the contract on the basis of a proposal that it submitted,” she wrote. “We found that the agency received a proposal from one of the three potential contractors, but this proposal was not from GC Strategies. There was no evidence that the agency considered a proposal or any similar document from GC Strategies for this non-competitive contract.”
Hogan found three contractors — GC Strategies, 49 Solutions, and KPMG — were given $4.5 million through non-competitive contracts related to ArriveCan that were extended over and over again.
“Multiple amendments were made to those non-competitive professional services contracts. Approximately half of the contract amendments extended the contract beyond the original period, which prevented or delayed opportunities for other contractors to compete for work. These amendments also resulted in additional costs,” she wrote.
Hogan also said she was concerned by evidence showing that GC Strategies was involved in the development of very specific and narrow requirements that were used when CBSA moved to a competitive process to award millions more in contracts to GC Strategies, the only bidder.
Advertisement 6
Article content
“This gave GC Strategies an advantage that other potential bidders did not have,” she said.
Hogan said that while it was reasonable in her view to seek external resources at the start of the pandemic outside of the public service to deliver services, she would have expected that there would be a transition to internal resources to operate the application as time went on, but it did not happen.
Hogan also found that people involved in deciding who was awarded the contract were treated to dinners and other gifts that they did not disclose.
“We found situations where agency employees who were involved in the ArriveCAN project were invited by vendors to dinners and other activities,” she said. “The agency’s Code of Conduct requires employees to advise their supervisors of all offers of gifts or hospitality regardless of whether the offer or gift was accepted. We found no evidence that these employees informed their supervisors as required.”
Among Hogan’s recommendations in her report are greater oversight for third-party contracts and improving transparency in communications between governments and vendors. Current Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said the government will be implementing all of Hogan’s recommendations.
Advertisement 7
Article content
“We absolutely share her view …that this content contracting practice was unacceptable,” he said. “Under no circumstance would we pretend that because the whole world was facing this global pandemic, that the contracting rules that need to be robust to handle taxpayers money can somehow be disregarded.”
LeBlanc said he has complete confidence in the current head of the CBSA Erin O’Gorman to resolve the issue.
“She is taking all of the appropriate steps to hold anybody to account in the case of alleged wrongdoing, but also to ensure that this kind of circumstance can never be allowed to happen again,” LeBlanc said.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said the RCMP should investigate whether criminal activity occurred in the contracting arrangements.
Certain employees and contractors have had their cases referred to the RCMP by CBSA, which has launched an investigation into the mismanagement of the ArriveCan app.
“We want the truth to come out and we want the police’s findings to be complete and public, so that Canadians know about all the corruption and mismanagement in the Trudeau government,” he told reporters.
Advertisement 8
Article content
Poilievre also pledged to cut back on outside consultants if he forms government and save money by letting the public servants do the work at a cheaper cost.
NDP MP Blake Desjarlais said the ArriveCan debacle is the result of “decades of underfunding” to the public service which has left it needing to subcontract some of the work to private companies.
“It puts them in a position where they can very clearly overcharge Canadians,” said Desjarlais.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has found that the size of the federal public service expanded by 15 per cent from 2015 to 2021, while spending on federal workers rose from $39.6 billion to $60.7 billion over the same period.
National Post
rtumilty@postmedia.com
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.
Article content
CALGARY – MEG Energy says it earned $167 million in its third quarter, down from $249 million during the same quarter last year.
The company says revenues for the quarter were $1.27 billion, down from $1.44 billion during the third quarter of 2023.
Diluted earnings per share were 62 cents, down from 86 cents a year earlier.
MEG Energy says it successfully completed its debt reduction strategy, reducing its net debt to US$478 million by the end of September, down from US$634 million during the prior quarter.
President and CEO Darlene Gates said moving forward all the company’s free cash flow will be returned to shareholders through expanded share buybacks and a quarterly base dividend.
The company says its capital expenditures for the quarter increased to $141 million from $83 million a year earlier, mainly due to higher planned field development activity, as well as moderate capacity growth projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
Companies in this story: (TSX:MEG)
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Premier David Eby is proposing an all-party committee investigate mistakes made during the British Columbia election vote tally, including an uncounted ballot box and unreported votes in three-quarters of the province’s 93 ridings.
The proposal comes after B.C.’s chief electoral officer blamed extreme weather, long working hours and a new voting system for human errors behind the mistakes in last month’s count, though none were large enough to change the initial results.
Anton Boegman says the agency is already investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change.
He says the uncounted ballot box containing about 861 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie was never lost, and was always securely in the custody of election officials.
Boegman says a failure in five districts to properly report a small number of out-of-district votes, meanwhile, rippled through to the counts in 69 ridings.
Eby says the NDP will propose that a committee examine the systems used and steps taken by Elections BC, then recommend improvements in future elections.
“I look forward to working with all MLAs to uphold our shared commitment to free and fair elections, the foundation of our democracy,” he said in a statement Tuesday, after a news conference by Boegman.
Boegman said if an independent review does occur, “Elections BC will, of course, fully participate in that process.”
He said the mistakes came to light when a “discrepancy” of 14 votes was noticed in the riding of Surrey-Guildford, spurring a review that increased the number of unreported votes there to 28.
Surrey-Guildford was the closest race in the election and the NDP victory there gave Eby a one-seat majority. The discovery reduced the NDP’s victory margin from 27 to 21, pending the outcome of a judicial review that was previously triggered because the race was so close.
The mistakes in Surrey-Guildford resulted in a provincewide audit that found the other errors, Boegman said.
“These mistakes were a result of human error. Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province,” he said.
“Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.
“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes,” he said.
B.C.’s “vote anywhere” model also played a role in the errors, said Boegman, who said he had issued an order to correct the results in the affected ridings.
Boegman said the uncounted Prince George-Mackenzie ballot box was used on the first day of advance voting. Election officials later discovered a vote hadn’t been tabulated, so they retabulated the ballots but mistakenly omitted the box of first-day votes, only including ballots from the second day.
Boegman said the issues discovered in the provincewide audit will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
He said he was confident election officials found all “anomalies.”
B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had said on Monday that the errors were “an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
Rustad said he was not disputing the outcomes as judicial recounts continue, but said “it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process.”
Rustad called for an “independent review” to make sure the errors never happen again.
Boegman, who said the election required fewer than half the number of workers under the old paper-based system, said results for the election would be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday.
Full judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna-Centre, while a partial recount of the uncounted box will take place in Prince George-Mackenzie.
Boegman said out-of-district voting had been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters utilized the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A public memorial honouring former judge, senator and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, Murray Sinclair, is set to take place in Winnipeg on Sunday.
The event, which is being organized by the federal and Manitoba governments, will be at Canada Life Centre, home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
Sinclair died Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73.
A teepee and a sacred fire were set up outside the Manitoba legislature for people to pay their respects hours after news of his death became public. The province has said it will remain open to the public until Sinclair’s funeral.
Sinclair’s family continues to invite people to visit the sacred fire and offer tobacco.
The family thanked the public for sharing words of love and support as tributes poured in this week.
“The significance of Mazina Giizhik’s (the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky) impact and reach cannot be overstated,” the family said in a statement on Tuesday, noting Sinclair’s traditional Anishinaabe name.
“He touched many lives and impacted thousands of people.”
They encourage the public to celebrate his life and journey home.
A visitation for extended family, friends and community is also scheduled to take place Wednesday morning.
Leaders from across Canada shared their memories of Sinclair.
Premier Wab Kinew called Sinclair one of the key architects of the era of reconciliation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sinclair was a teacher, a guide and a friend who helped the country navigate tough realities.
Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada.
He served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba to examine whether the justice system was failing Indigenous people after the murder of Helen Betty Osborne and the police shooting death of First Nations leader J.J. Harper.
In leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada and heard testimony from thousands of residential school survivors.
The commissioners released their widely influential final report in 2015, which described what took place at the institutions as cultural genocide and included 94 calls to action.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Justin Trudeau’s Announcing Cuts to Immigration Could Facilitate a Trump Win
Officer suspended over alleged involvement in protest at Brampton temple: Peel police
Nova Scotia election: Tory leader won’t invite Pierre Poilievre to join campaign
Rustad seeks review as Elections BC says box of 861 votes went uncounted
‘Be ready for both’: Canadians prepare for any outcome as Americans head to the polls
Mahomes throws 3 TD passes, unbeaten Chiefs beat Buccaneers 30-24 in OT
Canada’s Dabrowski and New Zealand’s Routliffe pick up second win at WTA Finals
Restaurant Brands reports US$357M Q3 net income, down from US$364M a year ago
Comments