Morning Update: ArriveCan app subcontracting ‘illogical and inefficient,’ Trudeau says

Good morning,Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the government’s approach to building and maintaining the ArriveCan app through contracts and subcontracts tied to a two-person

staffing company is “highly illogical” and he has asked for a review by the Privy Council Clerk.The Globe and Mail reported yesterday that GCstrategies – the two-person

Ottawa-area staffing company that has received millions of dollars in federal commissions on IT projects – subcontracted its work on the ArriveCan app to six other companies,

including multinationals such as BDO and KPMG.At a news conference in Toronto, Trudeau was asked why the federal government can’t hire these companies directly or perform IT work

in-house, rather than paying millions in commissions to the small staffing company.“That’s exactly the question that I just asked of the public service,” Trudeau replied.

“Obviously, this is a practice that seems highly illogical and inefficient. And I have made sure that the Clerk of the Privy Council is looking into procurement practices to make

sure that we’re getting value for money and that we’re doing things in a smart and logical way.”A person holds a smartphone set to the opening screen of the app in a photo

illustration made in Toronto on June 29, 2022.Giordano Ciampini/The Canadian PressThis is the daily Morning Update newsletter. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was

forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for Morning Update and more than 20 other Globe newsletters on our newsletter signup page.Ottawa’s record on innovation

generates skepticism around nascent investment agencyAfter years of disappointing innovation programs that haven’t fixed Canada’s chronic economic underperformance, the Liberal

government is still trying to get it right.Its latest attempt is the Canadian Innovation and Investment Agency, a Canadian version of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency, which spearheaded the creation of technologies such as the internet. Like other federal innovation programs, the CIIA is inspired by success elsewhere, namely Finland,

where the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation helped transform the Nordic country’s low-tech sectors into innovative, competitive industries.Innovation policy watchers are now

waiting to see whether Ottawa selects the right leaders and governance structures to deliver on the agency’s mandate. What also isn’t clear is how much the CIIA can change

chronically uninventive Canadian companies or whether an agency modelled on a small country in the European Union will work here.Read more from The Globe’s Per Capita series:A