Olympic Bill Tops $6 billion
Olympics bill tops $6 billion — so far
By Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun columnist, January 23, 2009
Residents of Climax, Sask., or Come-by-Chance, N.L., probably don’t know that their provincial governments ponied up $1.5 million for the big sports extravaganza in Vancouver next winter.
Folks in Quebec and Ontario must be wondering what they’re getting for the $5 million that their politicians tossed into the pot, if they even know that’s been done.
Then there’s their portion of what Ottawa is spending on the Games. Its spending is more transparent than British Columbia’s; its website shows a total of $654.65 million in Olympic “investments”.
But that doesn’t include the full cost of security, which may be close to $800 million more than the budgeted $175 million. Another nearly $23 million has been paid by “official sponsors” Canada Post, the Royal Canadian Mint and the Vancouver Port Corp. That doesn’t include any travel expenses for politicians and staff, who went to the Olympics in 2006 and 2008 as fact-finders and glad-handers.
Add it up and — ka-ching! — it’s more than $1.55 billion.
But why should other Canadians know? At Ground Zero, none of us has any real idea. B.C.’s auditor-general, John Doyle, can’t dig out the province’s costs and he has all but thrown in the towel.
In December, he reported that B.C. has not fully disclosed the risks associated with the cost and revenue projections and still refuses to include what he and two previous auditors believed should be counted as Olympic-related costs — the billion-dollar Sea-to-Sky Highway improvements, the near-billion-dollar trade and convention centre and the $2-billion Canada Line.
That’s close to $4 billion, plus the $600 million the government admits to. And even that’s not the full story.
There are million-dollar odds and sods strewn throughout different budgets.
The auditor-general has pegged the total of some of those bits at $170 million — $47 million for the 2010 Winter Games Secretariat, $21 million for the pavilions in Turin and Beijing, $15 million from BC Hydro, $15 million from B.C. Lottery Corp. and $6 million from ICBC.
Hydro, ICBC and the Lottery Corp. are all “official sponsors.”
Still, there are other items that might have slipped under the auditor-general’s radar.
One of the big-ticket ones was the $300-million “Olympic bonus” that unionized government employees got for signing a four-year contract that ends after the Games (and after the election).
The province will also be paying employees to “volunteer” at the Games. The government says it won’t cost a thing. Hard to believe.
And, how much did it cost for BC Ferries to wrap its three new fast-ferries in Olympic promotional material for the maiden voyages from Germany? That’s not included in Olympic costs.
There’s also no accounting for the cost of the Education Ministry developing an “Olympic curriculum.” But there’s no accounting for that.
Then, there’s Vancouver and the other municipalities, which are paying about $250 million to get to the party, as my colleague Bruce Constantineau outlines in his story. There’s probably more, but it’s almost impossible to obtain full copies of contracts they signed with Vanoc.
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts didn’t think it would be a problem when I asked for Surrey’s agreement in early December, nor did deputy city manager Dan Bottrill. But Vanoc had to sign off on releasing it. I’m still waiting.
This is taxpayers’ money, our money. We don’t know exactly how much is being spent.
But by our incomplete tally and with another year to go until the Games, it’s more than $6,000,000,000.
All this money, and only Vancouver residents had a choice about the Olympics. No other Canadians did.
Maybe a majority would have said: “Yes, let’s have a big winterlude” and “Yes, we’d rather spend $6 billion on the Olympics than on homelessness or literacy or a million other worthy projects”.
We’ll never know.
Seven billion dollars is a lot of money. But that’s not the Games’ highest cost.
The biggest price is another bit of democracy lost.