A Canadian vaccine passport? This company is offering to do it for free

With Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino promising earlier this month to implement a COVID-19 passport for international travel, a Canadian firm is offering to do it for free in the form of a smartphone app.

Vector Health Labs — an Ontario company specializing in private COVID-19 testing — is offering to devise a digital vaccine passport based on their existing CANATRACE platform, a contact tracing app already in use by private companies such as Starbucks and The Keg.

“No net new development needed,” Vector Health CFO Jay Fischbach told National Post.

The proposal is for a federal government-branded app that would register either someone’s vaccination status or their most recent COVID-19 test. When entering a business or facility with COVID-19 screening, the user would simply would simply scan a QR code and their details would be uploaded.

“In the event that there is an infected individual at that organization we can then broadcast that back to those individuals,” said Vector Health CEO Rob Godfrey.

Godfrey is the son of Paul Godfrey, the executive chair of Postmedia, which owns National Post.

Vector Health runs several Toronto-area testing centres providing private COVID-19 testing — including antigen testing — and has contracted with several major firms to manage COVID-19 tracing among employees.

Vector’s app allows individuals to log their most recent COVID-19 test results in a “verifiable wallet.”

CANATRACE, which Vector Health has just acquired, is a replacement for pen-andpaper contact tracing methods. Rather than have customers manually fill out their contact details on entering a business, CANATRACE clients simply prompt the user to enter their details on a Canadian-hosted database where the results are deleted every 30 days.

Any federal app would essentially be a melding of the two technologies.

However, Godfrey said that the app technology could also be extended to other health screening measures, such as checking for flu shots among individuals entering a care home. “It can integrate with any kind of ticket screening app,” he said.

Vector Health says they have approached the office of Mendicino, but have heard nothing back.

Although many Canadian businesses have implemented vaccine checks as part of their reopening strategy — most notably sports teams such as the Toronto Maple Leafs — Canadian governments are yet to roll out an official vaccine passport credential.

Last week, B.C. became one of the first to offer a provincially certified proof of vaccination that users could save to their smartphones. In Alberta and Ontario, meanwhile, provincial governments have actively opposed the introduction of such credentials.

On Aug. 11, just before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the federal election, members of his cabinet announced the pending rollout of a vaccine passport that could be used for international travel.

WE CAN THEN BROADCAST THAT BACK TO THOSE INDIVIDUALS.