One contractor, also a government employee and former PPC candidate, campaigned against vaccine passports while making millions from them

It’s hard to know where to begin with ArriveCan and its absurd tragicomedy of the deranged, but let us do so nonetheless and try to get some enjoyment of the silly, goofy and imbecilic nature of the whole thing. If we’re all going to get soaked for $60 million, we might as well have a laugh before grabbing the pitchforks.

In the heady days of COVID, the government wanted to speed up arduous customs line-ups and ensure compliance with pandemic restrictions by having travellers submit their vaccination and health status prior to arriving on Canadian soil. Not a bad idea in and of itself.

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But governments are seldom content to let a good idea proceed untarnished. And so we have since learned that an app originally tagged at $80,000 for development has cost the taxpayer at least $59.5 million.

With government profligacy, it is easy to glaze over what type of cost mismanagement that really is. Divide the one by the other and you can see that cost has inflated by a factor of 743. The mind reels, so let’s talk in more familiar terms. In B.C., a two-litre bottle of milk will run you about $6.49 at Save-on-Foods. So imagine one........

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