The app itself? Anyone with decent coding knowledge could design it in a few days, it isn't overly complicated

Then you have to deal with data systems to keep track of the data gathered, which will have been their main costs.

Then there's the security elements that need to be developed amd maintained

And finally, upkeep of the servers hosting the data. Following FOIPPA legislation, those servers need to be physically based in Canada, so likely that will have been more costly than one would expect.

All in all? Probably around $100k base + maintenance of a few thousand per month? Honestly, with how much government always overspends on everything, I'd expect to see it having had cost them around half a million dollars between development and upkeep. Even a million would seem rational to me. Anything more than that and I'm starting to feel it's wasteful. I Believe they were at around 8x that?