Home Canadian News Portman: Costly ArriveCAN was not only glitchy, but discriminatory

Portman: Costly ArriveCAN was not only glitchy, but discriminatory

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Portman: Costly ArriveCAN was not only glitchy, but discriminatory

Senior citizens, 35 per cent of whom see no need for a smartphone, were early victims of the blinkered view that everyone uses such devices.

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Set aside, for a moment, the unsupportable $59-million cost, the fact it kept crashing, that it could cause headaches at ports of entry as well as for border communities, that nearly 200 different versions were rolled out over a 30-month period, that it was not properly tested, that one notorious glitch erroneously notified some 10,000 returning Canadians that they needed to quarantine.

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Consider instead the indisputable fact that ArriveCAN was discriminatory from the beginning — victimizing many who were unable to meet the app’s particular technological needs.

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No rational person can deny the case for tighter border restrictions, including proof of vaccination, during the pandemic. But this doesn’t excuse the wilful decision by government to unleash a flawed system that disadvantaged a substantial chunk of the population to an unnecessary and unacceptable degree.

There is a wider problem at play here: the advent of a blinkered culture that assumes we are all fully wired in to our brave new digital world, whatever its shortcomings. Examples abound of such nonsense. Is it really progress to replace a Via Rail station’s parking-ticket machine with a QR code requirement that’s impossible to use without a smartphone? On a more dismaying level, there was the Nova Scotia RCMP’s admission, in the wake of the mass-shooting tragedy, that it normally relied on Twitter to warn the population of an emergency. That’s right: Twitter (now X), once the trash-talk enabler of Donald Trump.

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ArriveCAN belongs in its own unique crackpot category, built on the premise that we would all happily acquiesce in supplying necessary border-entry information electronically before returning to Canada. Senior citizens, 35 per cent of whom see no need for a smartphone, emerged early on as the most obvious victims, given that the feds initially seemed to be proceeding on the blinkered assumption that every Canadian owned one.

Yet, as it turned out, even possession of a phone offered no certainty of success. Buried amidst the bureaucratic verbiage, there was a stern caution: to access ArriveCAN you needed a device that met the app’s requirements. And many did not.

Despite these confessions of fallibility, there were stern warnings at the time about the unacceptability at the border of paper proof of vaccination, even if it was a government-issued document — and threats of 14 days’ quarantine and a $5,000 fine if you didn’t comply. Electronic transmission in advance through the ArriveCAN portal was the government-ordained way: all you needed to do was first photograph your proof of vaccination on your phone. Old-fashioned hand delivery to an immigration officer was out.

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It didn’t take long for a group of Conservative MPs to sound the alarm. It was bad enough that there was no acceptable alternative method of compliance for beleaguered seniors, but there was a wider problem related to anyone who was simply not computer or tech “savvy.”

The government finally got around to giving fresh advice to returning travellers stymied by an app that to them was inaccessible. They could simply visit the ArriveCAN website and do the necessities directly. To be sure, they might have to go in search of a public library with a computer or seek the help of fellow travellers better equipped than they. User friendly? Think again.

I had no immediate plans for travelling abroad when the pandemic was still rampant, but out of curiosity I decided to put things to the test. Neither my serviceable Apple desktop nor my spanking new tablet proved capable of downloading the app itself. So I turned to the actual website — and my screen kept freezing up, then dissolving into nothingness.

Despite the ArriveCAN fiasco, we should applaud any measure that eases passage across the border, provided that it’s not discriminatory — and uses technology that works. Consider, for example, Jamaica.

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If you’re headed there you’re encouraged to dispatch your entry information electronically in advance to border authorities. But, importantly, you also have the option of completing the form in the airport on arrival. On my last two visits, I visited Jamaica’s user-friendly website and sent the information off in advance without glitches. On arrival, I was processed relatively quickly. A border officer scanned my passport, my e-mailed information popped up on a screen, and I was in my way.

Did this technology cost $60 million to create? I very much doubt it.

Ottawa’s Jamie Portman is a freelance journalist.

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