GC Strategies was awarded 3 other border agency contracts while working on ArriveCan

GC Strategies was hired to work on three other Cana‐ da Border Services Agency projects as it was working on the controversial Arrive‐ Can app.

The company has been facing heightened scrutiny ever since the federal auditor general cited excessive re‐ liance on contractors as a major factor contributing to

ArriveCan's ballooning costs.

The CBSA has told CBC News that it contracted GC Strategies to work on three other applications between 2020 and 2022. The news was first reported by La Presse.

The projects include an app that is currently being tested to track and report cargo data and an app that helps border agents assess the risks posed by travellers and vehicles.

The third project is an app that allows arrivals subject to the Immigration Act to report to the CBSA. That app has not yet launched.

The total value of these contracts is just over $8.3 million. GC had been paid $19 million for ArriveCan as of last year.

Roch Huppé, Canada's comptroller general, told the House public accounts com‐ mittee last week that GC Strategies and its predeces‐ sor, Coredal, have been awarded 118 contracts to‐ talling $107 million since 2011.

The government sus‐ pended all of its current con‐ tracts with GC Strategies in November. Last week, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) announced that it had suspended GC

Strategies' security status, ef‐ fectively banning the com‐ pany from bidding on new contracts with security re‐ quirements.

The heads of GC Strate‐ gies, Kristian Firth and Dar‐ ren Anthony, will appear sep‐ arately before the govern‐ ment operations committee on Wednesday and Thursday. It will be the first time the two have made public com‐ ments since Auditor General Karen Hogan released her re‐ port on ArriveCan last month.

Hogan said she found lit‐ tle documentation to show how or why GC Strategies was chosen to work on Ar‐ riveCan.

The company was given a sole-source contract in April 2020 despite a lack of evi‐ dence that the firm had provided a proposal docu‐ ment for the project, Hogan's report says.

Hogan also found that GC Strategies was involved in de‐ veloping requirements that were later used for a compet‐ itive contract. That contract valued at $25 million - was awarded to GC Strategies, the report says.

WATCH | ArriveCan was a hot mess, auditor general finds:

A previous report by Alexander Jeglic, Canada's procurement ombudsman, found that the criteria used in awarding the $25 million contract were "overly restric‐ tive" and "heavily favoured" GC Strategies.

Jeglic also found that GC Strategies "copied and pasted" government-listed requirements for subcontrac‐

tors on numerous occasions when submitting proposals to CBSA officials.

Hogan's report also raised concerns about CBSA officials having a close relationship with certain contractors, not‐ ing that the officials in ques‐ tion were invited "to dinners and other activities."

Those officials did not dis‐ close information about these invitations to their su‐ pervisors. Hogan said that "created a significant risk or perception of a conflict of in‐ terest around procurement decisions."

The CBSA has been con‐ ducting its own internal in‐ vestigation of ArriveCan. Agency president Erin O'Gor‐ man told the House govern‐ ment operations committee in January that the investiga‐ tion's preliminary findings caused her a great deal of concern.

O'Gorman said the inves‐ tigation found "a pattern of persistent collaboration be‐ tween certain officials and

GC Strategies. They show ef‐ forts to circumvent or ignore established procurement processes and roles and re‐ sponsibilities."

Two public servants, An‐ tonio Utano and Cameron MacDonald, were subse‐ quently suspended without pay.

New investigation launched

Canada's Public Sector In‐ tegrity Commissioner Harriet Solloway has launched an in‐ vestigation into both the management of ArriveCan and into Utano's and Mac‐ Donald's suspensions.

Utano and MacDonald have claimed that they're being scapegoated by senior CBSA officials. Both men told the House government oper‐ ations committee last month that they did not have a friendly relationship with people from GC Strategies and did not recommend that CBSA hire it to work on Ar‐ riveCan.

MacDonald said the initial findings from the CBSA's in‐ vestigations are "baseless ac‐ cusations unsupported by any corroborating evidence, accusations of wrongdoing supported by cherry-picked emails and calendar entries."

The lawyer for MacDonald and Utano told CBC News his clients are seeking to have the preliminary findings of the CBSA's investigation sealed by a judge because the allegations could cause irreparable damage to their reputations and careers.