Canada Border Services Agency

ArriveCAN began as an emergency border-health service and became a test of whether government can reconstruct what it bought, who performed the work, what the work cost and why each procurement decision was reasonable. The central failure was not that an application necessarily had no public purpose. It was that speed, fragmented authority and weak records made it impossible to demonstrate a precise total cost or consistently connect requirements, resources, security, deliverables, invoices and releases. Repair therefore requires more than new rules: it requires operating evidence that emergency procurement remains reviewable while the emergency is still under way.