Steven Chase
Ottawa — From Tuesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, May. 25, 2010 9:49PM EDT Last updated on Wednesday, May. 26, 2010 8:28AM EDT
The Harper government is preparing to spend close to $1-billion on security for world leaders gathering in Ontario this summer – meetings in which one of the top items on the agenda is reining in state profligacy.
The soaring security bill for safeguarding the late June Group of Eight and Group of 20 summits is now several orders of magnitude greater than the costs of similar meetings in Japan and Britain.
That price tag is more than 20 times the total reported cost for the April, 2009, G20 summit in Britain, with the government estimating a cost of $30-million, and seems much higher than security costs at previous summits – the Gleneagles G8 summit in Scotland, 2005, was reported to have spent $110-million on security, while the estimate for the 2008 G8 gathering in Japan was $381-million.
It appears that Canada will spend close to 1 Billion dollars to host a small elite group of world leaders from countries that are themselves wondering how the hell they are going to keep on the lights. If you're gonna go, go big.
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