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A Federal Court judge has temporarily blocked the distribution of an internal ArriveCan investigator’s report after a former Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) manager requested it be sealed.
In his July 7 decision, Justice Henry Brown said former CBSA director general Cameron MacDonald had established he would face “irreparable harm to his professional reputation” if the report was distributed.
“The allegations each side makes against the other are most serious,” wrote Justice Brown in the decision, which was first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter. “They deserve a full hearing.”
Brown granted a temporary injunction against the distributing or disseminating of the final draft of the “Professional Standards Investigation Report.”
Brown noted that the underlying facts in the case are “heavily contested” and that the parties involved “dispute the timeline, purpose, merits and procedural fairness of this investigation and report.”
MacDonald and former CBSA employee Antonio Utano, who both worked on the development of the ArriveCan app while employed by CBSA, were suspended without pay over allegations of misconduct related to the app’s development. They allege that the suspensions were an attempt to silence their criticism and have said they’re being scapegoated by current and former executives of the CBSA.
MacDonald and Utano told a parliamentary committee in 2024 they were targeted for telling the same committee that senior CBSA executives misled Parliament when they appeared before MPs earlier in the fall to answer questions about the ArriveCan app.
An internal Preliminary Statement of Facts completed in 2023 by the CBSA has never been made public. MacDonald and Utano requested back in 2023 that the report be rescinded, claiming they were denied “procedural fairness” during the agency’s investigation and were not told of the details of the complaint that triggered the investigation.
Conservative MP Larry Brock read out a portion of the report at a 2024 meeting of the House of Commons Government Operations Committee, saying that it alleged “serious employee misconduct, so serious that [the CBSA] required the RCMP to investigate at least two criminal charges: fraud and bribery.” He added that the report said an ArriveCan contractor had also “solicited a bribe.”
MacDonald said in testimony before the committee in 2024 that he delivered a “detailed costing of $6.3 million” for the app and was “not responsible” for its $60 million price tag.
A non-binding Conservative motion calling for GC Strategies to reimburse $64 million to taxpayers within 100 days recently passed in the House of Commons, despite Liberal MPs voting against it.
The ArriveCan app, which was used to track the COVID-19 vaccination status of travellers entering Canada, became the centre of a scandal over the exorbitant costs of building it and issues related to the procurement process. Critics said it could have been developed for a fraction of its estimated $60 million cost, while the auditor general said record-keeping around its development was poor.
The report also found the three government bodies tasked with managing the procurement, development, and implementation of ArriveCan—the CBSA, Public Health Agency of Canada, and Public Services and Procurement Canada—showed a “glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices throughout ArriveCan’s development and implementation.”
