Toronto tech companies cloned ArriveCan in under 48 hours to show the government overpaid millions

A Toronto-based tech company says it recreated ArriveCan within less than 48-hours to show that the federal government overpaid millions for the app.

Sheetal Jaitly, chief executive officer of Toronto-based TribalScale, said it would have cost his company less than $1-million to build the app – a fragment of the millions poured into the digital software.

“How could the government spend this amount of money on it?” Jaitly said while speaking to John Moore on Newstalk1010 Tuesday morning.

ArriveCan was established by the federal government to speed up the immigration process at Canadian international airports during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic era. On Oct. 1, the app became optional as the government lifted the mask mandate and health check requirements for travellers.

On Friday night, some of Jaitly’s colleagues launched a voluntary hackathon with the goal of cloning the app and showing the public how fast and cheap it would be to build.

“By Saturday mid-day, we had the majority of it complete,” Jaitly said.

ArriveCan’s cumulative cost has been contested. While a CBSA report said the organization had spent a total of $29.5-million on the app, media reports have cited a $54 million price tag.

However, the government said the figure is “misleading” since it represents more than just money spent on ArriveCan.

Anthony Housefather, Member of Parliament for Mount- Royal, told CTV News Toronto that the $54 million figure also encompasses costs such as contact tracing for officers and primary inspection kiosks.

“Not all apps are the same,” Housefather said. “ArriveCan is not a simple information sharing app. It is a secure transactional tool that used Artificial Intelligence to verify proof of vaccination.”

Jaitly acknowledged it takes less time to clone an app than it does to build it from scratch, but still, he said it goes to show the amount of effort, time and money it could have taken.

“Let’s be honest, ArriveCan is a glorified form. There is not much more to say than that,” he said.

Lazer Technologies, another Toronto-based company that designs and builds digital products, also took part in a weekend hackathon with the same goal. At their company, a single employee rebuilt the “core app” over the course of the Thanksgiving weekend.

“Hopefully it opens up the discussion as to why Canada doesn’t have the best structure, team, resources, tools, frameworks, etc to produce new technology efficiently,” the company said in a news release on Tuesday.

“We understand that mistakes were made, but the only way to improve moving forward is to learn from mistakes that were made and to implement those lessons in future scenarios.”

For months, ArriveCan was fiercely criticized for facing technical glitches, being outdated by health standards and acting as an economic barrier for border communities.

While the hackathon concluded on Monday, Jaitly said this project should be seen as a long-term opportunity for the Canadian government to use the tech community as a sounding board for digital issues.

“We will do it for free,” he said. “Let’s help our government get smarter about tech.”

As a first step, Jaitly announced in a Tuesday news release that his company will be holding their first Canadian Technology Consortium meeting on Friday, which will be free and available to all levels of government.

“We hope the government takes this into account for the future as considering more diverse technical partners in Canada for their projects can help them tap into a larger talent pool across Canada and help them achieve their goals at a more reasonable cost to taxpayers,” the Lazer news release concluded.