One contractor, also a government employee and former PPC candidate, campaigned against vaccine passports while making millions from them
It’s hard to know where to begin with ArriveCan and its absurd tragicomedy of the deranged, but let us do so nonetheless and try to get some enjoyment of the silly, goofy and imbecilic nature of the whole thing. If we’re all going to get soaked for $60 million, we might as well have a laugh before grabbing the pitchforks.
In the heady days of COVID, the government wanted to speed up arduous customs line-ups and ensure compliance with pandemic restrictions by having travellers submit their vaccination and health status prior to arriving on Canadian soil. Not a bad idea in and of itself.
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But governments are seldom content to let a good idea proceed untarnished. And so we have since learned that an app originally tagged at $80,000 for development has cost the taxpayer at least $59.5 million.
With government profligacy, it is easy to glaze over what type of cost mismanagement that really is. Divide the one by the other and you can see that cost has inflated by a factor of 743. The mind reels, so let’s talk in more familiar terms. In B.C., a two-litre bottle of milk will run you about $6.49 at Save-on-Foods. So imagine one night you tell your significant other you are just nipping out to grab some milk for breakfast and you come home with a bill of $4,822.07. I’ll just put myself to bed on the couch tonight.
Watching this all play out last week, I kept reminding myself what Donald Trump taught us all from 2016 to 2020: if you ever think you’ve hit the bottom, think again. Not in terms of trepanned lunacy of course, just in terms of competency in governing. I was proven more right than I could have dreamed.
The auditor general had already shocked Canadians last month with revelations about GCStrategies, a two-person firm that had billed the government for millions in dubious ArriveCan work (if one can call it that). Then, last week, we learned the identity of another one of the hitherto unknown ArriveCan contractors who ran up the bill on all of us. The company is Dalian Enterprises and it charged $7.9 million for its services in creating the buggy app.
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Dalian, like GCStrategies, has only two employees. One of whom is David Yeo, Dalian’s CEO. Now, it is surprising enough that a two-person operation could extract $7.9 million for a $80,000 app, but we are only just getting started. Yeo, you see, works at the Department of National Defence. “What!?” you cry. “A federal government employee chiselling the government like that? Unbelievable.” It is, but we’re not done.
Yeo also has political involvement, just not the type you might presume. He was — and this is true — the People’s Party of Canada candidate for Ottawa West-Nepean in the 2021 federal election, a position from which he campaigned against vaccine passports.
So let us summarize that for anyone whose head is spinning.
An employee of the Department of National Defence, who campaigned and ran for the People’s Party of Canada against vaccine passports, made himself millions by helping develop a vaccine passport app. Keep in mind that his business model doesn’t involve much development, but instead relies on finding subcontractors to do the actual work. The app subsequently saw its costs balloon from $80,000 to $59.5 million.
Phew. What a ride!
During the pandemic, governments made understandably rash and sometimes poor decisions. If we are fair and remember that time as it was, we ought to view many government decisions made in that time with some degree of magnanimity provided they were done with the best information at the time.
However, it becomes clearer by the day that in Canada, COVID became a political football and a plaything for our government to funnel money to dubious causes and drive wedges to divide and infuriate Canadians. Getting COVID wrong is one thing. Getting it wrong for political and financial gain is galling and perhaps unforgivable.
Rounding out the perverse nature of all of this is the fact that ArriveCan actually works now. The 10 per cent of arrivals to Canada who use it spend less time in line and are processed more smoothly through our border.
The ArriveCan debacle does perhaps have one benefit. Its collection of smoke and mirrors, bad ideas, poor financial choices, questionable characters and cringy punchlines together neatly encapsulate a metaphor for what our current government has become: a joke.
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