A programmer duplicated ArriveCan in two days, an app that cost Ottawa $54 million

In order to critique ArriveCan’s eye-watering $54-million price tag, over the Thanksgiving weekend a single techie managed to duplicate the app in less than two days.

The endeavour was the brainchild of Lazer Technologies, a Toronto-based app developer that was among many in the Canadian tech sphere who were outraged to learn the federal government managed to spend $54 million on a relatively simple border screening app.

“The true cost to implement this shouldn’t have been this high — it should have been more efficient,” explained company co-founder Zain Manji in a blog post.

And so, Lazer initiated a “hackathon” among its employees to see how quickly it would take to replicate the entire app from scratch.

Developer Daniel Whiffing accepted the challenge, and by dinner time on Thanksgiving Day he had created a working clone of ArriveCan that is near-indistinguishable from the original. Whiffing even posted the code online so fellow programmers can check his work.

The company says that as soon as the clone app is approved for Google Play and the Apple App Store, anybody will be able to download their ArriveCan clone and take it for a spin.

Lazer was careful to note, however, that throwing together a clone app is a much easier task than building one from scratch. “We need to have some empathy for all of the pieces outside of purely building the app and experience,” wrote Manji, adding “$54 million of empathy is unlikely though.”

On Monday, another Toronto-based tech company, TribalScale, also announced that its employees had used the Thanksgiving weekend to replicate ArriveCan. Again, it only took about two days to deliver a pitch-perfect recreation of the app.

In Tribalscale’s case, they were trying to make the point that Ottawa maybe isn’t very good at technology procurement. The goal of this was to show how smart and talented the Canadian tech community is and offer up a new resource to help with the procurement of technology services for the Canadian government,” wrote CEO Sheetal Jaitly in a statement.

Given that ArriveCan is a relatively simple text-based screening app, its raw development costs could conceivably have been delivered for under $250,000, some say. At $54 million, the price tag is more akin to that of a major Hollywood film or big-budget video game release.

In the last federal budget, the Trudeau government earmarked $25 million for maintaining the app.

But budget documents recently uncovered by The Globe and Mail revealed that the app’s true cost was closer to $54 million.

The federal government managed to outsource the app’s development to no less than 23 separate companies, eight of which raked in commissions of more than $1 million. The largest single beneficiary was GCStrategies, a company headquartered in a rural Ottawa house that appears to specialize largely in federal tech contracts. So far, GCStrategies has collected $9 million for work related to ArriveCan.

Most notably, all this money hasn’t even delivered a particularly good piece of software. ArriveCan was notoriously plagued by glitches in its early months. In July, a technical error caused the app to order 10,200 travellers into mandatory quarantine despite the fact that they had filed their vaccine information correctly.

First launched in April 2020 and kept mandatory until Oct. 1, 2022, ArriveCan spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic as a compulsory public health screening requirement for travellers entering Canada. This would come to include functioning as the Canadian Border Service Agency’s sole recognized method of checking vaccine passports; anyone looking to bypass the app and present paper credentials were either turned away or ordered into quarantine.

On Friday in the House of Commons, Conservative MP Michael Barrett asked the government how ArriveCan could possibly have cost $54 million, saying “tech experts are confounded by its costing more than a low seven figures at worst.”

His reply, delivered by Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, was simply, “I will make no apology for an app that saved the lives of tens of thousands of Canadians.”

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