Living large on the world stage isn’t easy or cheap. It takes rock-ribbed determination and a certain lack of due diligence to spend nearly $1 million every minute, or more than $1 billion in total, hosting a three-day world leader whoop-de-do.
To understand the challenge of plowing through that much money, consider the magnitude of a billion. If you were lucky enough to have $1 billion in $1,000 bills, stacking them would require 10,000 piles of 100 each. Or think of it as some have: a billion minutes ago, Jesus was alive.
A billion of anything is a lot. Yet a ruling Tory party that flatters its own fiscal prudence is spending that much on security alone for the twin Huntsville and Toronto G8 and G20 summits.
How is it that the meter will be ticking over for taxpayers at $833,000 for every minute the leaders actually chew the fat?
Solving those mysteries will take much longer than the meetings. Kevin Page, Parliament’s budget officer, is taking a peek at the numbers this week, but the bottom line will remain untested until the federal auditor general completes a closer, post-summit look.
Even so, what’s known now is that costs have multiplied like lusty rabbits since 2002 when Canada last hosted the G8 at Kananaskis.
Security then was comfortably under $200 million despite the logistical demands of patrolling a lot of wilderness.
Problems are poles apart. Instead of shoehorning the G20 conference into Muskoka, an option that might have restored some of the intimacy summits have lost, the Harper government chose Toronto.
Security insiders say a summit in the country’s largest metropolis isn’t as dumb as it first seems. Big cities have the required infrastructure and their cosmopolitan residents are accustomed to life-skewing events.
But it’s also true that change and duplication cost money. Instead of a 10,000-strong army of police and rent-a-cops, the two-location summit will require twice as many.
Numbers are still on the back of an Ottawa envelope.
But by the time the ink dries on federal cheques, Ottawa is expected to have paid local police forces more for summit services than the total security costs at Kananaskis.
Conservatives claim every cent is justified by the weighty agenda. That would be more convincing if a flaccid draft G8 final communiqué hadn’t leaked, or the G20 meeting wasn’t a rehearsal for the fall Korea session.
Disappointing summits are not new. What’s fresh and worrying is that as costs rise, control is apparently in free-fall.
From the deep suspicion that federal, provincial and metropolitan forces are padding their bills to the pork barrel rolling out in Tony Clement’s riding, there’s a nagging sense police, public servants and politicians are wallowing in a bottomless trough.
Instead, ruling Conservatives may be slamming into the brick wall of taxpayer resistance. Apart from boggling minds, the billion-dollar summit cost threatens the Prime Minister’s reputation as a prudent manager. It’s a small jump from summit security costs and a fake lake to awkward questions about how wild spending has turned surpluses into deficits.
A billion, it turns out, is more than a numbing number. It’s also a disturbingly precise measure of what happens when prime ministers and their cliques forget to treat every public dollar as if they earned it themselves.
Jim Travers writes for The Toronto Star Syndicate.