Bundesgericht entscheidet gegen zwei hochrangige Beamte, die an der Beschaffung von ArrivalCan beteiligt sind

Two senior public servants linked to the controversial procurement process behind Ottawa’s costly ArriveCan app have lost their bids to have the Federal Court overrule internal grievance findings related to allegations of misconduct against them.

Justice Avvy Yao-Yao Go issued the decisions Monday after two days of public court hearings in March.

Cameron MacDonald and Antonio Utano worked together at the Canada Border Services Agency as senior officials responsible for IT matters in 2020 when the agency launched the app for cross-border travellers at the onset of the pandemic.

Mr. MacDonald is now an assistant deputy minister at Health Canada and Mr. Utano is a director-general at the Canada Revenue Agency.

Early last year, the CBSA prepared a draft Professional Standards Investigation Report that, according to Monday’s rulings, contained “findings regarding several misconduct allegations” involving each of the two men.

The allegations are not detailed in the court’s decisions and the CBSA’s investigative findings have never been made public.

The public servants’ relationships with private IT contractors have been under scrutiny amid questions about how the agency used outside companies to build ArriveCan, whose initial $80,000 expense grew to in excess of $56-million in the course of more than 70 updates.

The two men launched separate grievances last year alleging that the CBSA’s internal investigative process was unfair. They argued that they were not provided with adequate documentation by the CBSA. They also said the process for responding to allegations was insufficient. Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Utano have called for the investigation report to be dismissed in favour of a new review by a fully independent body.

Both grievances were unsuccessful. The men sought judicial reviews of those grievance decisions by the Federal Court, which dismissed those requests Monday. The ruling could clear the way for the decisions to be shared with their current employers, who could choose to act on them.

“I find the applicant fails to discharge his burden of demonstrating that the decision was unreasonable. I therefore dismiss the application,” Justice Go wrote in her MacDonald decision. A similar ruling was issued in response to Mr. Utano.

Mr. MacDonald is ordered to pay the respondent, the federal government, $22,268.70 in legal costs, while Mr. Utano is required to pay $19,440.

In her rulings, Justice Go said she is only focusing on whether the grievance decision should be dismissed.

“I wish to emphasize that my decision does not speak to the merits of the CBSA’s allegations against the applicant, nor the reasonableness of the draft PSI Report itself,” she wrote in the MacDonald ruling, adding that there will be other opportunities for the two men to challenge the CBSA’s investigation.

But they get to keep their jobs. F@#$ this timeline.

I remember wasting my time fulling that nonsense out and the agent did not even check the certificate.

This kind of shit wouldn’t be a problem if the work was done in-house…

The addiction to contracting everything invites corruption.