The Other ArriveCAN Scandal - Part One

The $54 million scandal has been in the news for over a year now. What has been overlooked is that the players at the centre of it all started in the same place: a company that barely seems to exist.

The biggest player - financially speaking anyways - in the ArriveCAN application scandal is an information technology consulting company called GC Strategies. An enterprise that was dreamt up one night over beers in Ottawa in 2015, according to an old article, GC Strategies was created when three young men decided to strike it out on their own and form an IT consulting business. Named one of the fastest growing companies in Ottawa at the time, it would later become known for being the shell entity run out of a riverfront home that fleeced taxpayers for millions of dollars during the application’s development.

“We listened to what the market was saying and what our clients were saying about what would help them be more successful,” co-founder Kristian Firth said in an interview. “We decided to take a risk and leave our jobs and build this company to help our clients.”

That risk turned out to be worth quite the reward, those clients ended up being millions of bilked taxpayers, and those men were Darren Anthony, Kristian Firth and Caleb White. The former two would later become infamous for their role as so-called “ghost contractors” in the ordeal; the latter escaped relatively unscathed and his history at GC remains largely unknown. The jobs that they left to pursue their ambitions of becoming rich consulting middlemen were overlooked somehow though in all of the chaos that’s ensued, but it’s hard to believe that it’s just a coincidence that they all began in the same place: a company that hardly seems to exist, except for on paper on contracts in the tens of millions of dollars for projects from nearly every federal department in our government.

The fiscal issues with ArriveCAN arose in fall of 2022, following the scrapping of the contentious mandatory border travel application that saw practical problems, mass non-compliance, protests, lawsuits, and malfunctions in the programming which wrongfully sent thousands of Canadian citizens into quarantine. Tickets for refusing to use the app to re-enter Canada during the pandemic carrying fines in the thousands of dollars are still being fought - often successfully - today. Outrage ensued after citizens were unlawfully detained due to “glitches.” The application was - despite considerable federal pushback - finally shelved and laid to rest where it belonged, but that was only the beginning of the fiasco.

What began as an $80,000 initiative for our “health” quickly ballooned into a $54 million taxpayer nightmare. A cost analysis obtained by the Globe and Mail based on figures provided to a parliamentary committee on the boondoggle demonstrated a complex network of consulting contractors who had contributed to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) project following contradictory testimony provided by the CBSA on the contractors working on the application’s development. The development of a border measure that could track the vaccination status of travellers and order punitive measures for non-compliance was first hatched by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), but ownership and responsibility of the program was subsequently transferred to the CBSA. The app originally launched on April 29th, 2020, after just five short weeks of development. Over two years and more than 70 updates later, the agency reluctantly submitted documents to committee detailing that the ArriveCAN app had no less than 27 contracts associated with it - some pre-dating the pandemic (which was the given rationale behind the need for it) - involving 23 individual companies. Or so it seemed, anyways. There are indicators that the unique companies were perhaps not so unique after all, but that they were working together, cross-contracting and inflating costs all along the way. What they each contributed exactly to the failed venture and the value of those contributions has, for the most part, yet to be determined.

The lion’s share of the ArriveCAN cash of course went to GC Strategies, a company with little history, two employees, and a sketchy background that was determined by this author, based on the Globe’s reporting, along with assistance from online volunteers, as being operated out of a riverfront home in Ottawa. Far from being as advertised, it was immediately evident that GC Strategies had no in-house capacity to build an application, let alone maintain it - contrary to their presentation - and further exposés eventually led to more in-depth parliamentary investigations into the murky world of self-serving government contracting and sub-contracting taking place at the expense of all taxpayers.

The study, now part of a criminal investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for fraud amongst other serious allegations, revealed an ugly commerce underbelly comprised of million-dollar commissions taken in by consultants for doing little more than hiring people that could perhaps maybe do the work somewhere down the line. That work was described as sub-standard in almost all accountings of it except for those by the people who were involved in doing it, and ultimately resulted in the demise of the costly “public health” initiative and the shelving of the application by the fall of 2022. There is much to say about the debacle and still much to be discovered: false testimonies, forged documents and fake resumes suggest what we have uncovered so far is just the tip of a pricey, mammoth-sized iceberg. The probe is ongoing.

But this is not the story of that.

This is a story of consulting and contracting and subcontracting; of cronyism and crookedness; and of the shadowy public service that is running the projects that are running our country with almost no oversight or accountability - often from outside of it. A story of empty offices and unanswered phone calls; of wildly inflated costs and conflicting information; of obfuscation and misrepresentation. At best, it’s a story of gross fiscal mismanagement and incompetence with a heavy dose of falsification. At worst, it might end up being full blown criminal fraud and embezzlement.

It’s the story of a quest to find the other ArriveCAN contractors.

It began with a deserted headquarters.

To be continued…….