Canadian Police List Summit Security Expenses
OTTAWA — Canadians were amazed to learn that hosting the world’s leaders at back-to-back summit meetings on a weekend in June cost more than $1 billion, most of it for security. Their surprise was renewed this week when newly released documents provided a glimpse into how the police had managed to spend so much money in so little time.
The information provided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to an opposition member of Parliament accounted for only about one-sixth of the overall cost of the summit meetings. But it included a wide array of unexpected or expensive items.
Among them were $13,711 for glow sticks; $62 million on accommodations and meals; $17,500 for “fireballs,” or magnetic warning lights for police cars; and $4.3 million for a temporary steel fence around a lakeside resort where the Group of 8 meeting took place.
Insects appeared to be a major preoccupation. The police spent $325,000 on kits containing insect repellent, hand sanitizer and sunscreen; $25,975 on electronic mosquito traps; and $13,900 on “bug jackets.”
The police force bought some special equipment for the meetings, including a $42,000 harpoon system to disable speedboats. It also bought $260,000 worth of digital cameras, many of them Nikon D300s’s; $260,000 worth of computers; and thousands of dollars in software.
“They took the position that money was no object,” said Dan McTeague, the Liberal member of Parliament from Toronto who requested the spending information. “If it weren’t so costly, it would be humorous.”
The contracts represent the latest in a series of disputes over the cost of the meetings. Canada initially agreed to host the gathering of the Group of 8 leaders in Huntsville, Ontario, a summer resort town. But before the event took place, it was superseded by the Group of 20 as the world’s premier economic gathering.
Because Huntsville was too small to host the larger gathering, Canada decided to stage the events at separate locations, the Group of 8 meeting in Huntsville and the Group of 20 meeting in Toronto, an approach that sent costs soaring.
The actions of the security forces were ultimately as much a source of contention as their expenses were. Five separate reviews are under way into the efforts of the police during the Group of 20 meeting in Toronto.
The documents released by the mounted police provided an incomplete record. They did not include the cost of a much larger security fence that made much of downtown Toronto resemble a prison camp. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service declined to provide any spending information, citing national security. And the Department of Foreign Affairs referred Mr. McTeague to its broad budget estimates, which do not break out the cost of the summit meetings.
Mr. McTeague said he was puzzled by how much the police spent on equipment because the force had led a $1 billion security effort at the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver this year. He said it appeared that little, if any, of the equipment acquired for that operation was reused during the summit weekend.
Sgt. Julie Gagnon, a spokeswoman for the mounted police, said the costs incurred by the force for the meetings “were spent as per government polices and guidelines and as efficiently as possible.” The glow sticks, she added, were for “officer safety.”
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