ArriveCAN: Canada's $80,000 pandemic border app ended up costing $59.5 million

In April 2020, with the border closing, the Canada Border Services Agency needed an app to collect travellers' contact and health information. It judged it had no capacity to build one itself and went outside. An early estimate put the preliminary development at $80,000. Three years later the Office of the Auditor General could only estimate the total: approximately $59.5 million — and 18% of the invoices it tested did not carry enough detail to say whether they even belonged to ArriveCAN.

The middle of the supply chain was a two-person Ottawa recruiting firm, GC Strategies, which was paid $19.1 million — about a third of the total — to manage work it subcontracted to six other companies. The agency had almost no documentation on how or why GC Strategies was picked in a non-competitive process, and the firm then helped write the requirements for the 'competitive' contract that followed. Contractor days ran at roughly $1,090 per diem versus $675 for equivalent government IT positions, and more than 30 contractors billed the project.

Delivery discipline matched the procurement. CBSA released 177 versions of the app between April 2020 and October 2022 with little to no testing documentation; a June 2022 update wrongly ordered about 10,000 travellers to quarantine. Auditor General Karen Hogan said the record-keeping was so poor the precise cost can never be known, and described a glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices across CBSA, the Public Health Agency of Canada and Public Services and Procurement Canada.

About $59.5 million estimated — precise cost never determinable — against an initial $80,000 estimate; GC Strategies alone billed $19.1 million

Pandemic urgency became a reason to skip controls rather than document fast decisions, and emergency flexing hardened into a permanent operating model.

CBSA outsourced not just the build but its own oversight — the supplier helped draft the requirements of the request for proposal it later won work under.

Commission-based body shops sat at the centre of the supply chain, so every dollar of scope creep was billed and marked up.

Financial record-keeping was so weak that invoices could not be attributed to projects, making value-for-money assessment impossible until the 2024 audit.

Urgency is not a licence to drop procurement discipline: without competition, documentation and cost attribution, a buyer cannot know what it bought or stop a middleman compounding the bill.

The February 2024 report triggered an RCMP examination — already seeded by a CBSA referral over Botler AI allegations — and a request from the Conservative leader for a criminal investigation. The app itself survived: since October 2022 it no longer collects COVID data but remains the voluntary channel for customs and immigration declarations, a $6.2 million digital declaration feature inside a $59.5 million program. A programmer had duplicated the core screening app in two days in 2022, a comparison the government never credibly answered.