MPs raise spectre of ‘scary’ ArriveCan report as auditor’s work awaits

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Allegations of bribery, corruption, deleted emails and a House of Commons committee that said a report into the ArriveCan app was too “scary” to discuss in public. This has not been a good week for the Justin Trudeau government when it comes to the various investigations into the ArriveCan app and it’s only going to get worse.

ArriveCan has truly become ArriveScam.

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On Monday, the federal auditor general will release a report into the expensive, failed, COVID-era debacle.

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The ArriveCan app was the $54-million boondoggle that the Trudeau government forced people entering Canada to use when travel restrictions were still in place during the pandemic. It was slow, it was buggy, it didn’t work well.

We’ve already been treated to stories about how one company, GC Strategies, won the contract for the app and then sub-contracted out most of the work while taking a hefty slice of the pie. We learned in a recent report from the procurement ombudsman that 76% of contractors on the project “did not perform any work on the contract.”

On Monday, Michel Lafleur appeared at the Commons government operations committee. Lafleur is the executive director of professional integrity for the Canada Border Services Agency and has presented a preliminary report that on Monday was only in the possession of Conservative MP Larry Brock.

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Referencing the report in front of him, Brock said that there were allegations of Health Canada employee misconduct “so serious that you required the RCMP to investigate at least two criminal charges, fraud and bribery.” Brock later tried to discount those allegations, claiming there was no evidence, but Lafleur said an investigation persists.

Then there was the allegation that 1,700 emails were deleted or corrupted beyond recovery by a senior civil servant working on the project. That was information that Lafleur said he shared with the auditor general but not with the RCMP, even though it would be a violation of the law.

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At a certain point during Wednesday’s meeting, the Liberal, Bloc and NDP MPs voted to pause their investigation into the app given what they saw in Lafleur’s report. They were worried that it would hurt police or other investigations, which the Conservatives disputed.

So we have an app that started out with a budget of $80,000, then ballooned to $54 million and didn’t work as intended. Now we also hear allegations that many of those paid did no work and emails may have been deleted or destroyed as well as allegations of bribes.

But wait, there’s more.

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Conservative MP Jeremy Patzer asked the government through an order paper question how many executives working on the ArriveCan app received bonuses. Shockingly, five of eight Health Canada executives working on the project received bonuses in the 2020-21 fiscal year and six in the 2021-22 fiscal year.

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The total amount paid out was $342,929 over the two years.

“As these bonuses (and at-risk pay) are based on the full year of performance for the entire year and for the responsibility and management of an entire portfolio, it is not possible to discern what part of the bonus or at-risk pay would have (been) attributed to the ArriveCAN application,” the government response said.

That’s a nice sentiment, but how about no bonuses for messing up so badly?

“It doesn’t matter how good any of my other work is. If I blew a project so badly that it cost my company $54 million and became a national scandal, there’s no way I’d be getting a bonus,” said Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

As Terrazzano pointed out in front of a committee last fall, Canadians are out $54 million, but no bureaucrat is out of a job, though since he said those words two have been suspended pending further investigation while others have been promoted.

On Monday, we will find out more about the ArriveCan app and how it has become the ArriveScam app. Perhaps one day we will even find out why Liberal, Bloc and NDP MPs were so scared of what they saw that they shut down a committee meeting into a report about the app.

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