Creating ArriveCan Cost Just $80K of Total $54M Price Tag, Says CBSA

A Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) patch is seen on a CBSA officer’s uniform in Calgary, Alberta, on Aug. 1, 2019. (Jeff Mcintosh/The Canadian Press)

Creating and launching the ArriveCan app in April 2020 cost the federal government just $80,000, but other factors such as maintenance and operating costs shot total spending up to $54 million, says the Canada Border Services Agency.

“The $54M we expect to have spent by March 31, 2023, was not just budgeted and spent on the creation and launch of the app itself, which [cost] $80K to launch in April 2020, but also on all the necessary work to operate, maintain and upgrade the app over the last two years,” said the CBSA in an Oct. 17 email to The Epoch Times.

“ArriveCAN is not a simple information sharing app, its a secure transactional tool that used industry standards,” added CBSA spokesperson Sandra Boudreau.

While creating ArriveCan cost just $80,000, CBSA said updating the app around 70 times cost $8.8 million and managing the app’s data cost $5.2 million.

The agency said $4.9 million was also spent on indirect costs associated with the project, including “employee benefits, accommodations and payments to other government departments.”

The app’s “technical support” and building and maintaining “other IT systems needed to support the border health measures” cost another $9 million combined.

Other costs cited by the CBSA include almost $2 million for ensuring the app was “accessible for users with disabilities” and $3.8 million for “contingency.”

‘Bloated Project’

Two Canadian tech companies, Lazer Technologies and TribalScale, announced on Oct. 7 that they would be recreating the ArriveCan app in a single weekend as a way of showing the federal government overspent on it.

Zain Manji, the co-founder of tech firm Lazer Technologies, said one of their employees cloned the app in less than two days.

Manji acknowledged in a previous interview that cloning an app is far easier than creating the original, saying, “It’s important to be a bit empathetic.”

“$54 million of empathy is unlikely though,” Lazer Tech said in a press release on Oct. 10.

Sheetal Jaitley, the founder of TribalScale, told The Epoch Times creating ArriveCan, complete with federal cybersecurity regulations and data management, should’ve cost less than $1 million.

“Us here at TribalScale have built end-to-end apps with like 15 different integration points on the back end, video streaming—I mean, think of the biggest media apps in the world that are so much more complex than ArriveCan—for less than a million dollars,” Jaitly said.

“The development effort here is minimal,” he added. “This is a form that needed to be presented on a mobile device and capture some information. This is not hard.”

CBSA had said $2.3 million was spent on ArriveCan to meet the federal government’s cybersecurity regulations.

However, Jaitley said programming these regulations into an app shouldn’t bring many, if any, additional costs.

“We build banking apps, we build health care apps, we build applications that are in highly governance and regulatory spaces,” he said, adding that TribalScale programs within cybersecurity regulations “without having that [development cost] being raised.”

“I think even if this was a bloated project with a lot of bureaucracy and consultants from multiple vendors coming at it and everything like that, it should’ve still cost less than a million dollars.”

Transparency

A House of Commons committee voted on Oct. 17 not to question Liberal cabinet ministers about ArriveCan’s $54 million cost.

Conservative MP Kelly McCauley originally introduced the motion to the Government Operations and Estimates Committee asking that at least five ministers appear before the committee to explain the government’s spending on ArriveCan.

However, his motion was amended by Liberal MP Anthony Housefather to scratch the section calling for ministers to testify. Housefather’s amendment was passed 7-3.

McCauley told The Epoch Times that the amended motion was “another kick in the face to taxpayers who have to cough up all this money.”

“It really robs us of any transparency in this debacle,” he said.

The committee will spend two meetings questioning various officials from government departments involved in ArriveCan’s development, such as the CBSA. If the committee decides further investigation is needed, it will hold a vote on increasing the number of meetings.

“We’ve asked for documents, contracts,” McCauley said. “We'll delve into it more.”