Canada’s Digital Contact-Tracing Experiment

To kick off a new monthly bonus series on tech in Canada, Paris Marx is joined by Bianca Wylie to discuss Canada’s COVID Alert app, the problems with the digital contract-tracing experiment, and why we need a public post-mortem so lessons are learned for next time.

Bianca Wylie is a partner at Digital Public, a co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Follow Bianca on Twitter at @biancawylie.

• This series on Canadian tech is made in partnership with Passage, a left-wing publication in Canada. Passage published an edited transcript of the conversation.
• On June 17, 2022, Health Canada decommissioned the COVID Alert app.
• In April, Bianca wrote that the government needed to shut down the COVID Alert app because it wasn’t working (if it ever had). She also began writing a series on the app on her Medium blog that month.
• In July 2020, Bianca and her colleague Sean Mcdonald were already asking questions about the app and the planning around it.
• Other digital contact-tracing apps were launched in many other countries, including Australia, France, and Iceland, with poor results.

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