First surfaced on Twitter by CBC provincial affairs reporter Mike Crawley, the URL "
covid-19.ontario.ca/verify" went to a simple website with the heading "Use the Verify Ontario app" as of Wednesday night.
By Thursday morning, the URL had been programmed to automatically redirect traffic to the provincial government's main "
Proof of COVID-19 Vaccination" portal.
What this is means is that you can't see the page live anymore — but you can see
a cached version of it courtesy of Google.
A snapshot of the page as it appeared on at 11:47 p.m. last night descibes Verify Ontario as "Ontario's official app for verifying COVID-19 vaccine certificates."
"Verify Ontario gives businesses and organizations a quicker, easier and trusted way to scan and confirm that visitors are fully vaccinated," reads a block of small text, the only other thing visible on the page.
"The Verify Ontario app launches later this month."
So there you have it: The government's forthcoming vaccine passport app (or at least the scanning portion of it) will apparently have a name every bit as original as
the wildly simple $650,000 logo created for the Ontario Cannabis Store back in 2018.
Let's hope the launch of this new app is smoother than that of
the OCS website, or even the Ministry of Health's own COVID-19 vaccination portal, which
went down on the first day that Ontario's vaccine passport rules were in effect.