There’s an international meeting coming up in Canada later this month. The Group of 8 Finance Ministers are getting together. June 25 and 26th the G8 are hittin’ the bong in Huntsville, just north of Toronto, up in cottage country. The Deerhurst Resort is the venue. The Deerhurst is a beautiful place with golf, watersports and a spa.
Unfortunately the media will not be allowed to go to the Deerhurst, as the High and Mighty G8 Bean Counters don’t want to be annoyed by the unwashed, ink-stained wretches. Media meat will be restricted to downtown Toronto. To keep the media vaguely sober and out of the massage parlours, our Canadian Government is putting on a Big Show.
Down at the Canadian National Exhibition, on the shores of Lake Ontario, in the Direct Energy Centre, our Gov is putting in a fake lake, Muskoka chairs, canoes and some live trees in the media centre. Estimated cost? $2,000,000 to pamper the media monkeys while the G8 talks about fiscal restraint up at the Deerhurst. The Fake Lake will be about a metre deep and cover a couple of hundred square feet.
(I wish I was making all this up, but I’m not. Here’s the link to more of the background on the deal, from the CBC.)
Late in the afternoon on the 26th, the G8’ers jump into a couple of 1972-vintage Chevy Econoline Shaggin’ Waggons and cruise to downtown Toronto to party it up with 12 more G-folk at the downtown convention centre. After the last case is empty, sometime on the 28th, they stagger out to Pearson airport, into the aircraft and bugger off home.
Total tab for the security is estimated at $1.1 Billion. Most of downtown Toronto is being closed with kilometers of concrete barriers being dropped into place starting yesterday.
There is an area set aside for Official Protests. It’s a park in downtown Toronto, not a lot bigger than your back yard. The fences, barricades and pepper spray dispensers are already in place. Voice-recognition technology from hidden microphones and surveillance cameras staffed by multilingual lip-readers will be searching for anyone who uses violent or offensive language. If a mutter is found to be foul, the entire Official Protest area can be flooded with pepper spray in mere seconds.
A chain-link veal pen is set aside for those who dare carry actual protest signs. After all a protest sign has a wooden stick in the middle and we all know what happens when protesters wave wooden sticks: Someone could put an eye out! The veal pen has pre-sighted sniper posts, so those stick wielding violence-crazed terrorists can be shot on site and the remains sluiced down the sewers and into Lake Ontario.
Naturally, the media is not permitted to be near the park: The media ID hard card does not allow the media to cover anything resembling news. Conflicting opinion is news, so the media is not allowed near the Official Protest Park for fear anything besmirches the collegial atmosphere of the G20 Summit.
Which brings up the entire question of costs. According to the CBC, here’s some of the previous security budgets for G8 and G20 Summits. All the events are post 9/11, so the security has been heightened to the usual irrational levels.
- September 2009 – Pittsburgh: $18 Million (G20)
- April 2009 – London: $30 Million (G20)
- October 2008 – Japan: $381 Million (G8)
- July 2005 – Gleneagles Scotland: $110 Million (G8)
- June 2010 – Huntsville and Toronto: $1.1 Billion (est.) (G8 & G20)
The numbers by comparison are so far out to whack as to be humorous, if it weren’t for the pesky problem that you and I are paying for it, directly, right out of our taxes.
Here comes the hard question: Are we paying for the security teams from other countries and if so, why?
There is a precedent for us paying the whole shot and it comes from the UN.
When you hear about little countries like Chad or Burkina Faso joining in on a UN police action or peacekeeping detail, one wonders how they can afford the involvement. The quick answer is, they can’t. Very few countries can afford the cost of having soldiers and support services, bullets, beans and beds, in theatre for more than a week at a time.
There is the whole question of transport. Most small countries do not have hardened transport or fighting vehicles beyond a few ancient APC’s that rarely start. They rely on the major powers for transport, including ‘copters, LAV’s, Strykers and so on. The US, the UK and Canada provide all the support services. The small country puts up the uniforms, a change of underwear and some bodies to fill the boots, relying on the UN stipend to earn some needed cash and the bigger UN players to provide everything else.
We suspect that is exactly what is happening with the G8 and G20 Summits.
Conceptually, the Italian Prime Minister has a security detail of several dozen people. Someone is paying to fly them over, including the advance team a few weeks before. They have to be put up somewhere, fed, watered and entertained while ostensibly performing the critical advance sweeps, liaison duties with the Canadian security groups, endless meetings and the usual briefings known as Death by PowerPoint.
In the world of common sense, the Italian government is paying for their own security detail, for their own PM, just as the US Secret Service is paying for the advance and security detail for President Obama. They would pay for the hotels, per diems, transport, phone calls home and the occasional dinner out with the lads. This is the “pay your own way” model and is the fair and common sense methodology.
If Canada is picking up the whole tab, it could be as grotesque as paying for the flights and fuel for the various G20 heads to jet into Pearson, as well as their security details, all the meals, all the hospitality, all the entertainment and all the hotel rooms that have been booked to house nearly 3,000 participants for a day and a half of work. Or it could be somewhere in between the other end of “pay your own way, you miscreants” where we pay for a goodly whack of the expenses for the other 19 countries to show up.
In any case, at either end of the spectrum, $1.1 Billion for the G8 G20 Summit security is almost triple what we paid for the entire Vancouver 2010 Olympics over four weeks.
Using some simple math, there are roughly 15 hours of actual G8-20 events over the four days of the meetings. Divide 1,100,000,000.00 by 15 and you get $7,333,333.33 per hour.
That is $7.3 Million per hour for 20
of the folks to get together to read a media release that their fartcatchers have already agreed is the final communiqué.
Your tax dollars at work.
RoadDave 