Olympic Security Budget Another Games Fiasco

By Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun, January 15, 2009

The federal and provincial governments are still arguing over how to split the cost of security for the 2010 Winter Olympics, amid every indication that the prospective bill has undergone a five-fold increase from the original estimate.

Best guesses put the likely tab at $900 million, vastly more than the $175 million that both levels of government stood by long after it had been mocked by security experts and the police themselves.

The inexplicable refusal to update the budget in the face of mounting evidence that it could not possibly be met insures another financial embarrassment at a bad time for the Games.

When the much bigger security budget is confirmed -- as it soon will be, according to the rumour mill -- it will come on top of the running controversy over the Olympic village.

Another day, another Games shocker.

Federal minister for the Games Stockwell Day tried to prepare Canadians for the bad news during the fall election campaign, when he warned that the original estimate for security was not even close to being operative.

He vowed that Ottawa could hold the line at below $1 billion, and he might yet try to claim victory for having done so.

But if that is indeed the final range for the security budget, then the B.C. Liberals will be scrambling to explain themselves.

They've stubbornly insisted on a budget of $600 million for the provincial share of staging the Games, despite mounting evidence that the supposedly all-in cost excluded any number of Olympics-related undertakings. Within that dubious envelope, they allowed only $87 million for the provincial share of security costs.

No wonder they are reported to be fighting hard to resist anything like a 50-50 split with Ottawa on the reputed-to-be $900-million revision of the total security budget.

The province holds to the view that it is only obliged to pick up a portion of any increased cost, as per a security agreement signed with the federal government almost three years ago.

"We share 50 per cent of the increased cost of security for what they call 'the Games security coverage area,' " according to provincial minister for the Games Colin Hansen.

Meaning, as he sees it, the province shares the added policing costs involved in guarding venues, athletes and the actual staging of the Games. Ottawa is supposedly on the hook for the rest, including protection of VIPs, anything involving the national security, and intelligence service and the Canadian Forces.

The two governments tried to define the boundaries between their respective obligations in that 29-page security agreement. They also appointed three federal and three provincial public servants to a committee to sort out any remaining details and dollars.

But Hansen says the committee bogged down over "an endless line-by-line micro-analysis" of who should pay for what. "Is this going to mean an additional cost for this police officer?" he told The Sun's Jeff Lee, "or is this a police officer who will be funded out of the base budget regardless?"
Eventually the province fired off a proposal of its own to determine the provincial share. Hansen is still waiting for a reply, he said this week.

"The feds came up with a number. We went back, basically saying we've some [concern] as to whether a lot of these expenditures are truly incremental or whether or not they're for costs that were outside the Games security coverage area.

"That's where we sit right now," he told Sun colleague Jonathan Fowlie on Tuesday. "The RCMP are the ones that develop the budget, not us. We are the ones that respond to it."

The finance minister still hopes to determine the B.C. share in time for it to be included in the provincial budget, which will be tabled in the legislature Feb. 17.

But time is running out. And even assuming the province's minimalist view carries the day with the cash-strapped federal government, I gather B.C. will still have to absorb a two- to four-fold increase in its original allotment for security.

Some escalation was to be expected. The Vancouver-Whistler Olympics are spread over a larger geographical area than previous Winter Games. They are being staged at a time of heightened concern about security, not least owing to the country's involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

Whatever the added cost for security, Premier Gordon Campbell insists the Liberals can cover it without breaking the budget. "We're going to use our contingencies to cover those costs," he told me in an interview last month. "It will be significantly more, but remember -- we've got contingencies both in the Olympic budget and we've got money that we haven't spent."

We should see next month how the B.C. Liberals propose to handle it. But I have to think the escalation in the security budget would have been far less dramatic had they responded to repeated urgings from supporters and critics alike to provide a more realistic estimate two or three years ago.

vpalmer@direct.ca