OTTAWA – A government bureaucrat who worked on the controversial ArriveCan app said she felt pressured to blame two suspended civil servants for the mess and compared the app to the sponsorship scandal in testimony before MPs Wednesday.
Diane Daly, who worked on the procurement but insisted she had no decision-making authority, said she was called into an interview with Canada Border Services Agency where she felt it was clear she was being asked to blame Antonio Utano and Cameron MacDonald.
She said the interview this past January was recorded and lasted three and a half hours and while she was initially told she was being interviewed only as a witness to potential misconduct she has now been accused of being party to it.
Utano and MacDonald were suspended after the CBSA conducted an internal review of their actions in the awarding of the ArriveCan contract to GC Strategies. The pair have disputed the report’s finding and insist they are being unfairly blamed for what happened with ArriveCan.
The internal review has never been released and Utano and MacDonald went to court in an unsuccessful effort to have it suspended.
Daly told MPs she believes she is now suspended because she wouldn’t blame Utano and MacDonald.
“I never saw Mr. MacDonald or Mr. Utano do anything nefarious.” she said. “I am currently on administrative leave from public works. I believe this is because CBSA and public works did not get the negative narrative expected about two former bosses at CBSA.”
She asked for the same consideration as Allan Cutler, a whistleblower who first raised the alarm about the sponsorship scandal in the early 1990s.
“I’m here to tell the truth, but I’m very concerned that if I tell the truth here, I’m going to lose my job.”
Daly said she was seconded to the CBSA to clear a backlog in procurement in 2018 and transferred back to the public works department in 2023.
She said she doesn’t know who pushed for GC Strategies to receive the contract, but said she believed MacDonald and Utano were told to do so.
“I wasn’t in the C-suite, so I don’t know who would have instructed him. I was just a low level employee, doing what I was told to do.”
Daly said GC Strategies were an approved contractor under the Government of Canada system and she was limited in her ability to challenge that once they were in the system. She said they had reached out to procurement officials to complain about GC Strategies poor documentation and wanted to suspend the contract to the firm.
She told MPs several times there should be an indepth review of that approved contractor process.
In a damning report, Auditor General Karen Hogan found contracts for the app were poorly documented with little justification for the decision to award it as a sole-sourced contract. The Auditor determined the app cost at least $60 million, but because of the poor documentation she couldn’t be 100 per cent sure of the price tag.
GC Strategies has been suspended as a company able to contract with the federal government and there is also now an RCMP investigation underway.
The Auditor General also found that GC Strategies had helped draft a contract it was later rewarded. After initially resisting, Kristian Firth, one of two owners of GC Strategies, named Daly before the House of Commons as the person who worked with him to design that contract that the company later won.
Daly said she has no idea why Firth named her and the limits of her job prevented her from taking the steps Firth said she did. She said she had no technical knowledge and simply processed procurements to ensure contractors were paid for the work they did.
“Any and all decisions were not mine to make. I had no access or no right to make decisions,” she said.
Conservative MP Garnet Genuis put a motion forward to have the committee to call Firth, and Daly’s managers as well as senior officials at the CBSA to testify again and for the full recording of Daly’s interview to be submitted to the committee.
He said the committee needs to keep digging to understand what happened.
“We want to get accurate information to get to the bottom of what happened in the arrive scam affair and we have clearly different members or factions within the senior public service who are criticizing each other, accusing each other of lying, of covering up information, of trying to cover people at the political level,” he said.
Time ran out before the committee could vote on Genuis’s motion, which will be considered at a future meeting.
The CBSA developed ArriveCan during the pandemic. It initially required travellers to provide their contact information and information on where they would be quarantining to border officers, which was then passed along to provincial health officials who could follow up.
Later it was made mandatory and travellers had to use it to provide vaccination information. The app malfunctioned at one point sending thousands of travellers into quarantine.
More to come …
National Post
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