Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise this afternoon to speak to a report produced by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts, of which I am a member. To be exact, this is a motion to concur in the 37th report of the committee, which dealt with the first 2024 report of the Auditor General of Canada, tabled last spring.
I will say off the top that I was not a member of this committee when the report was produced. The report consists of a single sentence that reads, “That the committee report to the House that it calls on the government to prohibit any government employee from simultaneously working as an external contractor.”
The motion that was put forward to create this report was supported by all the opposition parties, but not supported by the Liberal members of the committee, and I must say that it seems like a completely logical report, if extraordinarily short, so I am not sure why the Liberals voted against it. Be that as it may, the ArriveCAN app has been studied by numerous committees of the House of Commons, and for good reason. This is one of the most egregious examples of fiscal scandal that we have encountered from the government, and there have been many. On top of the public accounts committee, it has been dealt with in detail by the government operations committee, the industry committee and the international trade committee. I am sorry if I left any out. It might have been brought before the ethics committee. It certainly has been a clear lapse of ethics in many ways.
While I am a newly minted member of the public accounts committee, I was a member of the international trade committee when we studied and reported on ArriveCAN, so today I would like to direct my comments on ArriveCAN to the economic impacts of the app, in particular in reference to that study, entitled “The ArriveCAN Digital Tool: Impacts on Certain Canadian Sectors”.
We debated the report on that study a year ago, so some of my comments today will be similar to those I gave last November. Just to remind people, in case they forgot about the pandemic, the COVID pandemic hit North America in March 2020, closing this place on March 13, and a week later, on March 20, the governments of Canada and the United States agreed to temporarily restrict all non-essential travel across the border.
The pandemic had huge effects on the Canadian economy, and many of those impacts arose from restrictions that were placed on crossing the Canada-U.S. border. The ArriveCAN app was launched in April 2020, so basically a month after the pandemic was recognized. It allowed travellers entering Canada to input their quarantine plans and later their vaccination information in digital format. Then on November 1, 2020, use of the ArriveCAN app became mandatory for travellers entering Canada. I have to point out here that it was not so much the use of ArriveCAN that affected travellers, but the fact that for almost two years, from November 2020 to September 2022, the app was mandatory. Everyone crossing the border into Canada was required to use it. They could not fill out their information on the paper forms that had been used initially in the pandemic.
The international trade committee study I am discussing was concerned with the impact that the mandatory use of ArriveCAN had on certain sectors, in particular tourism. I think the most obvious impact was that when we create an application that can only be used on smart phones or tablets and then make it mandatory, it has an immediate impact on anyone who does not own a smart phone or a tablet, or even on those who find using smart phones a challenge. As such, I was a bit surprised that when the government was deciding to make this mandatory, no one asked the obvious question: What about people who do not have smart phones? Seniors are clearly a group that broadly fits that description.
This problem caused a lot of delays at border crossings, especially land border crossings. I heard a lot about that from my constituents, as there are six land border crossings in my riding, probably the most in the country for any riding. My constituents are used to travelling back and forth across the border for business, for shopping or for tourism, and many of them were affected by the mandatory requirement to use ArriveCAN. One of the additional problems in my riding is that several of these border crossings are found in areas without cell coverage, so people could not use the app at the border, or if there was cell coverage, it was from a U.S. cell tower so they had to pay extra roaming charges. All this resulted in extra work for travellers and border agents alike.
Mark Weber, the national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, said in testimony:
What I can tell you is that the numbers provided to you earlier by the CBSA, which said that 99% of air travellers and 94% of land travellers have the app completed, are absolutely false. Those numbers are the percentages completed after we helped them complete with the app. In the Eastern Townships branches, the numbers were closer to 60%, for example. Overall, we're looking at closer to 75% to 80% having it completed.
Essentially, our officers now largely work as IT consultants. You have land borders that have essentially become parking lots, with us helping people complete the app.
Mr. Weber's point was that it would have been quicker and more efficient for those who could not use the app to simply continue providing the paper form for giving information about quarantine plans and showing their proofs of vaccinations to CBSA officers, rather than having officers help them enter the information on phones they did not have or did not know how to use. Workers in duty-free stores had to help travellers with the app as well.
I want to remind people that it was not completely straightforward to use the app. Even with all this incredible amount of money spent, the app was filled with glitches. I consider myself pretty tech-savvy; I use two smart phones every day. However, it took me some work to save my vaccine certificates as images, find those files and upload them to the app.
There was an adverse impact on seniors, both Canadian seniors returning from the U.S. and American seniors trying to visit Canada. For one thing, the app asked for an address in Canada where the traveller would quarantine if needed. This requirement forced day trippers from the U.S. to lie because they had no real Canadian address to enter. We heard one story of a bus full of American seniors planning to spend the day on the more scenic Canadian side of Niagara Falls; they turned around at the border because of the ArriveCAN requirements.
A friend of mine was caught in a catch-22 web when she only uploaded one of her vaccine proofs, even though she had been vaccinated twice. The app did not like that, and it triggered a series of collection agency-like calls at all hours, threatening her with massive fines and worse. When she complained to the CBSA, she was told to simply ignore the threats.
The mandatory use of the ArriveCAN app had an impact on travel across the border, especially in terms of tourism. There are data I could cite that clearly show the immense impact of the pandemic in general on tourism, but it is hard to parse the exact economic impact of the ArriveCAN app itself.
The international trade report had some important recommendations about the app, as well as how the government could respond to support the tourism industry, which is still recovering from COVID restrictions. I would just like to mention two of those recommendations here.
The first was this:
That the Government of Canada ensure the safety and security of Canadians by continuing with its ongoing efforts designed to modernize Canada’s borders, including through the use of appropriate digital and non-digital tools, and through the provision of adequate human and other resources. These efforts should be informed by consultations with relevant stakeholders, during which particular attention should be paid to concerns about the potential for significant disruptions, confusion or delays at Canadian ports of entry. The focus should be airports and land crossings, including international bridges.
On this recommendation, I would just comment that we should encourage travellers to use digital tools when crossing the border by making these tools easy to use and ensuring that their use will make the travellers' entry into Canada easier, quicker and more efficient. That will result in more people using the tools. The lesson from ArriveCAN is that making digital tools mandatory will almost always result in unintended negative consequences.
The other recommendation I wanted to point out was this:
That the Government of Canada ensure that international bridge authorities and commissions, as well as duty-free stores in Canada, are eligible for federal financial support if the Government decides to close—for any length of time—the borders that Canada shares with the United States.
On this recommendation, I would like to comment on the incredible impact the COVID pandemic had on one sector within the tourism sector, and that is land-based duty-free stores. They suffered the biggest impact of any sector in Canada. My constituent Cam Bissonnette has two duty-free stores; he found that his business was in an essentially impossible position when the borders were closed because of COVID. For months on end, his business suffered a decline of over 95% in revenue. He and others in his sector were stuck with perishable inventory that they could not legally sell to anyone. While things have improved slowly since the borders reopened, the devastating impact of those times when the borders were closed have made it almost impossible to survive. I will simply add that I think the duty-free sector is generally misunderstood by the federal government in several ways, and I would ask that the government listen to its concerns carefully.
The main scandal here is the wanton waste of public money on an app that should never have been made mandatory. We are hearing plenty about that waste today. The ArriveCAN scandal is a very serious issue. It deserves to be studied thoroughly here in the House of Commons. As I mentioned earlier, it has been and is being studied at a number of committees. I know that public accounts has yet to produce a final report on it.
I will finish by saying that many of these scandals were directly caused by the rampant contracting out of work that could and should have been done by the public service. I want to mention the example the member for Terrebonne mentioned in her speech about the ArriveCAN scandal, in which not only did someone gain a lot of money through the wanton, terrible use of contracting out, with overspending on a massive scale, but that person was also already a member of the public service. They were getting money from both ends at the same time.
The latest file the international trade committee was looking at is CARM, the CBSA assessment and revenue management system, which is being developed by Deloitte. Again, it was farmed out to Deloitte, which is being paid almost $200 million to do that. It has been delayed again and again because, for various reasons, it was not working as planned. This is something that should have been developed in-house by the CBSA or by some part of the public service so that we would not have that incredible overspending. It suffices to say that the NDP is very much in favour of the House of Commons finally getting to the bottom of the ArriveCAN scandal. Today's debate will provide some opportunity to do that.
