Part 1: if the federal government is committed to the additional security funds, it'll be out on Tuesday with the new budget.
Part 2: the provincial government will unveil it in their own new budget in February.
Who wants to guess how much the total will be?
Will the federal budget include Olympic security funding?
By Jeff Lee, Vancouver Sun
January 25, 2009 10:01 PM
The billion-dollar question heading into Tuesday’s federal budget is whether it will include the government’s new costs of security for the Olympic Games.
Provincial Finance Minister Colin Hansen says he is praying, if only so he can then
publish the B.C. portion of the revised budget just before he issues his own budget in February.
With just one year to go before the 2010 Winter Olympics are to be held, the magnitude and scope of the security budget is still being withheld from the public by the Stephen Harper government. The security budget is thoroughly bound up in politics, held from view by officials and politicians who have broadly hinted at its magnitude.
So sensitive has the projected budget become that media relations officers at the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit (VISU), weary over the constant questions, now simply refer all questions to Public Safety Canada, the department that oversees the RCMP. The department, in turn, refuses to say when the figures will be made public or if they will be included in Tuesday’s budget.
Once projected to cost $175 million — a figure that even the International Olympic Committee questioned when it reviewed the Vancouver 2010 bid committee’s bid book —
the budget has ballooned to between $400 million and $1 billion. Those figures were revealed by Stockwell Day when he was public safety minister last fall.
But where the budget falls in between those two points is anyone’s guess. Some media reports have pegged the amount
close to $875 million.
British Columbia is responsible for half of the original $175 million budget, and a select portion of any “incremental” costs over that amount that pertain directly to the Olympics. But what that amount will be is also bound up in politics as the province and Ottawa have been arguing over what constitutes “incremental” costs.
Hansen said recently he sent the budget back to Ottawa with his own figure for what he believes B.C. owes, but that hasn’t satisfied the federal government.
What’s driving the new costs? Many things, but mostly it is the labour and accommodation costs associated with the tens of thousands of trained security officers VISU needs.
There is also a lot of layered costs attached to the Canadian Forces — they are providing ships, soldiers, air support and even ordinance divers — and also to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), which is coordinating airspace surveillance.
Assistant RCMP Commissioner Bud Mercer, the man in charge of VISU, says he’s trying to be smart about how security is provided as cost-effectively as possible.
For example, VISU has tenders out for a “perimeter intrusion defence system” that uses a combination of infrared, motion sensors and closed-circuit cameras to protect areas of Olympic venues where police aren’t necessary.
Tenders also just closed on a request for companies to provide screening and security services at all of the entrances to the venues.
Rather than pay for “officers with guns,” he said in a recent interview, VISU wants to turn repetitive work such as herding media and visitors through X-ray machines over to the private sector.
Mercer says that
for operational security reasons he won’t divulge how large a security force he needs.
But the government has already given clear indications of the scope of its human resource requirements:
the military expects about 4,000 of its personnel to be attached to the Games, and the RCMP issued a tender call for accommodating up to 5,000 officers on two cruise ships that will be tied up at Ballantyne Pier during the Games. (It replaces a tentative $37-million agreement the RCMP had with a cruise charter company that fell through and is now the subject of litigation.)
In the 2002 bid book, the Vancouver Bid Corp. estimated “that 8,500 security personnel will be deployed on a typical Games day.”
In earlier tender documents,
VISU also told prospective private security firms to consider the recruiting need for between 650,000 and 900,000 man-hours of employment.
Last week, Mercer acknowledged that time is now growing short and a number of large, expensive contracts are about to be let.
“We’re coming to decision day on a lot of stuff. A year ago, if I had 10 meetings on my calendar, nine of them would be to discuss something and one would be to make a decision,” he said. Now, it is the other way around.
Mercer was reluctant to say how VISU is paying for all of these requirements when the federal and provincial governments have not yet approved the overall budget.
But he noted he has to comply with federal Financial Administrations Act, which carefully governs how taxpayers’ money is spent and accounted for.
“In certain areas, because of the size and the cost of the RFPs [requests for proposals], and to remain 100-per-cent compliant with the [act] we’ve had to look at alternative funding sources,” he said. “Generally they’re funded by the RCMP.”
When asked if the RCMP was providing funds that would then have to be paid back, he said: “think that would be a fair description.”
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