Patchwork procurement: An institutional logics approach to the ArriveCAN scandal

During the pandemic, the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) created a digital application to manage the vaccination and quarantine status of incoming travellers. Years later, this application, called ArriveCAN, has faced significant scrutiny for its excessive cost and functional issues. What explains the dysfunction behind ArriveCAN? Drawing from an Institutional Logics Approach, this article advances an understanding of organizational dysfunction that is value-centric. Organizational dysfunction is a product of colliding and irreconcilable institutionalized values that go unfulfilled in part or whole. Applying this capture of dysfunction to ArriveCAN, this article observes three conflicting institutional logics throughout the procurement process. Here, the CBSA was caught between purchasing by cost and technical merit (market logic), advantaging Indigenous suppliers under the Procurement Strategy for Indigenous Businesses (community logic), and addressing a crisis quickly and effectively (state logic). These competing logics generated dysfunction in the contracting of ArriveCAN. In turn, the ArriveCAN scandal highlights the danger of an incomplete and contradictory purchasing system, particularly in a moment where governments are demanding more from their procurement. The article concludes with transferable lessons on centralized procurement policy design and objective delineation.