Government Operations committee  I apologize, there was an issue with the sound at the end of your question.

Government Operations committee  The overall cost of the first year of operation that I was tracking—I left right after that—was $6.3 million. That included security, hosting fees, validation, independent reviews, the build of the app, etc.

Government Operations committee  Yes, that's 100%. In fact, in my prior testimony, when I told you that Minh put Deloitte in the penalty box, the data office was trying to go with Deloitte, and Minh told them the exact same thing, so half of those costs moved over to our side, because it was all kind of orientated around cloud and storage and whatnot.

Government Operations committee  It's definitely politics. From our vantage point, I think we can show that there were over 40 million transactions done on the app using the web mobile platform. These were processed and were passed on to PHAC. I do recall that in the early days there were many studies about the speed at which people could transact, not to mention the cost.

Government Operations committee  Who are you asking?

Government Operations committee  Yes, we had a discussion with Mr. Brock.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Brock wanted to know a little bit about what I provided to the OAG. He wanted to know what my thoughts were, and he wanted clarification on the details around the office and who the CIO was. He wanted to confirm his assertion that Minh Doan was the CIO and that John Ossowski was the president at the time.

Government Operations committee  No, he never told me what questions. He kind of indicated that he wasn't necessarily happy with some of the testimony of other people and he really wanted to zero in on certain things to get to the bottom of where he didn't understand the connection point. Some of it I wasn't able to answer because I wasn't there anyway, not that it would be difficult for me—

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry.

Government Operations committee  It was a long time ago. I do recall that there were meetings between Kelly Belanger's team and her executive director. I don't know whether other members of her team were present. They discussed the scope of the work and tasks needing to be executed. I think that we signed the task authorizations for the required deliverables.

Government Operations committee  I don't have any evidence of wrongdoing, just to be clear. What I will say is that there were divisions, federal public servants, who wanted to associate with ArriveCAN so that they could get the funding they needed to move their initiatives forward.

Government Operations committee  Well, there were a few in the commercial branch. There were a few others in the travellers branch. We had some corollary projects that we had already started—some no-touch mobile, the e-declaration, some of these things that we were trying to work on—and if you just put it under an ArriveCAN tag line, it was easier to achieve the funding and get the budget you wanted from the finance branch.

Government Operations committee  I have to be honest with you: I wouldn't call it a lie. I would call it perhaps an exaggeration. They would align what they were hoping to achieve as their target with what was happening with ArriveCAN to obtain their outcome. It was a stretch. There's a very big difference between a stretch and a lie, in my opinion, but I never saw anybody nefariously lie so that they could get access to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Government Operations committee  I left after the first year. I wouldn't even be able to hazard a guess, but I would say the number would be higher than a million if you totalled it from my vantage point.

Government Operations committee  No, it's not true. As I've said before, the prototype was about $80,000. To get an app was about $400,000. I really wish Canadians would understand what it costs to actually convert paper into digital in the timelines that we had. This was included on two different mobile platforms, not to mention the changes.