The federal government finally put the ArriveCAN app (or, at least its mandated use) to rest on October 1 after months of outcry from the travel industry, border officials, and the Canadian masses over a decline in tourism and airport delays.
A Friday report indicated that Canadian tech industry leaders are largely appalled by ArriveCAN’s $54 million price tag, with some saying that taxpayers “got fleeced.”
Not only did the government spend more than double its original budget for ArriveCAN, but it also used 23 separate contractors (in addition to additional, unnamed subcontractors) to develop the app instead of just sticking to a single app developer.
Two Canadian tech companies that specialize in building apps for corporate clients, TribalScale and Lazer Technologies, are planning to hold internal hackathons to demonstrate that the ArriveCAN app could have been built for a fraction of the $54 million the Liberals spent on it, and several other firms have expressed interest in joining them — reports The Globe and Mail.
TribalScale CEO Sheetal Jaitly said he and his employees came up with the idea when they were discussing how much Canada paid for ArriveCAN during a video meeting on Friday morning. One staff member figured he could build ArriveCAN in two days.
“We all started laughing and one started feeding off the other. ‘Hey, why don’t we just go do this and show the world that this is completely ridiculous?'” he said about the staff discussion. Shortly after, Jaitly announced plans to rebuild ArriveCAN over the weekend.
We are so upset over the waste spending on ArriveCan that @TribalScale will rebuild this app over the weekend! We have the worlds best digital product builders right in Canada and our government allowed this to happen pic.twitter.com/P2uNcNMoir
— Sheetal Jaitly (@SheetalJaitly) October 7, 2022
Lazer Technologies co-founder Zain Manji told The Globe and Mail on Friday that his team is also launching a similar hackathon.
“It’s voluntary by us and over the weekend – like a hackathon project,” he told the publication. “Purely to show that, professionally speaking, an app like this should not cost as much as it did, and for the government to please consider other avenues or do more due diligence in the future.”
Manji and Jaitly have also talked over the phone about coordinating their efforts. Both hackathons are strictly voluntary for their employees, and both companies plan for their work to be open source and publicly accessible for free.
According to Jaitly, other Canadian tech leaders have reached out to him about possibly collaborating on the project.
“I think the [Canadian technology] ecosystem is taking a look at this and saying ‘Hey, we can run this as an open source project,'” he said. “Team up together, community driven, and say, ‘Hey, government, stop wasting our money.”
While the government no longer requires travellers to submit vaccination and other health information through ArriveCAN, the app lives on as a voluntary customs and immigration tool.
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So who’s in charge of approving payments to build this app, a 5-year-old (apology to the five years old out there)!!
I would not be surprised if an investigation turned up close links between the principals at GCstrategies or their subcontractors and the Trudeau family or Liberal Party of Canada. A scheme like they had with WE to funnel money to Trudeau’s family, while the Trudeau government directed hundreds of millions to WE would surprise no one.
If we had any independent and competent journalists left in Canada that weren’t being directly funded by Justin’s regime, someone might actually start digging.
This deserves a million upvotes.
No, unsourced and unproven claims deserve libel suits. Put up, or shut up “It’s Me.”
It’s a little early to be drinking.
What claim are you saying was unproven? I hope you aren’t referring to my comment about WE. It’s a matter of public record that the Trudeau family was paid handsomely by WE, with no observable qualifications. It’s also public record that the Trudeau government tried to direct hundreds of millions of dollars through WE.
Because if that’s the “claim” you were referring to, I’d say, I can’t help and am not responsible for your own self imposed ignorance. That makes you a Trudeau voter 🙂
it is criminal how government is allowed to waste people’s hard earned money like this. That is why whenever you get the chance to cheat the system, yo do it because they are always cheating you.
If it was a million or two, that might have been considered wasting money due to incompetence. But 50+ million, that looks more like corruption.
Ha! Wait till you find out how much more the UK government spent on its “Track & Trace” app that never worked and was never adopted! Wait for it …
37 billion pounds, yes BILLION. That’s C$56.3 billion. And that was development + operation budget for two years.
I’m not saying the Canadian government didn’t waste some money on its app; just pointing out that we got away CHEAP compared to what a number of other countries paid (and the lack of results they got back).
politicians everywhere are incompetent crooks
You are an incredibly dishonest person.
Track and trace in the UK was not an app. It was their entire UK health system program to perform all covid test and contact tracing. Every test, every person testing, working in labs, making calls, boots on the ground. Just the contact tracers hired in early 2020 was over 25000 people. They might have had an app component, but the cost was negligible to the overall Track and Trace system.
Not an app. You clowns can’t be honest about anything.
This doesn’t prove a thing. Any dev knows that $54 Million include more than just code. For ex: requirement gathering, design and much more. Coding is the last step. Reproducing something that already exist is faster and easier. Just like with music
Will we ever see a few invoices for how many hours were billed? If we take out the Amazon hosting of $4M, that’s almost $50M to contractors. Let’s say they charge out at $1k/hour; that’s 54,000 hours.
I came here to say just that. But Coding is not the last step. QA/UAT/maintenance/warranty are.
Still, $54 million for such a basic app is incredibly high. Arguing that they can’t produce a statement of work performed for the money by claiming they need to protect the privacy of subcontractors is super sketchy too. It’s government work, handling people’s private medical records. Transparency should be contract requirement number 1.
This doesn’t prove a thing. Any dev knows that $54 Million include more than just code. For ex: requirement gathering, design and much more. Coding is the last step. Reproducing something that already exist is faster and easier. Just like with music
Yes! Doing this doesn’t help anyone! Why don’t they make a free/working app that anyone can easily use? 🤷♂️🙄🙄