Here we were looking at the whole time between the development and the launch of the ArriveCAN app, which was in early 2020, all the way to January 2023. That's a few years' time.
The assessment that was done by the Public Health Agency and the Canada Border Services Agency at the beginning was that they didn't have the skills or the capacity at that time to do it. I would have eventually expected to see a transition in order to reduce that long-term reliance on an external vendor with aspects like maintenance of the application.
What I think is missing here fundamentally in many of the IT contracts that we see in the public service is that acknowledgement that there needs to be a transfer of knowledge or skills at some point. That isn't there. Over-reliance on a third party is created when the public service isn't looking to help transition and upskill the public service itself.