ArriveCan Contractor GC Strategies Got $19M Despite Being a Two-Person Company with No Software Experience

OTTAWA – GC Strategies, the company at the centre of the ArriveCan app scandal, received $19.1 million in federal contracts despite being a two-person IT staffing firm with no demonstrable software development experience. The company, run by two former government IT consultants out of a home office in Ottawa, subcontracted virtually all of the work to other firms while pocketing a 15-30% commission on every dollar. They were essentially a middleman that added no value, said a former senior procurement official. The government could have hired the actual developers directly and saved millions. Instead, we paid GC Strategies to find someone else, and then paid that someone else too. It is a business model that should not exist in government procurement. One of the founders of GC Strategies boasted in a since-deleted LinkedIn post about their expertise in navigating government contracting, writing: You do not need to build anything. You just need to know how the system works. That, unfortunately, turned out to be entirely accurate. The Auditor General noted that GC Strategies was awarded contracts without competitive bidding, using a loophole in procurement rules that allows sole-source contracts under $100,000 — except GC Strategies was awarded 47 contracts each just under that threshold, totalling $19.1 million.

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