This is going to be a very VERY short blog posting, but I would like to ask a quick question.
Firstly, i'm not a person who complains about politics a lot. Ohhhh! I'll talk about why in a blog soon and get some opinions about that.
Anyways, not into politics, but I'm really dissapointed in how Canada budgeted the G8 Summit costs. In a news article I read:
News agency Ria Novosti notes that the 2009 U.S. G20 summit cost US$18 million, while Canada's pricetag for the meetings was well over $1.1 billion.
"Thus Canada will spend 51 times more than the US did just a year ago to protect G8 leaders from Canadians," the agency writes.
So my questions... why? Why did our government feel the need to spend this kind of money. Why did we decide that we needed to spend well over a Billion dollars more than the states did just last year? Do you not realize what you could have done with that money? How many lives you could have saved, hungry mouths you could have fed, scholarships you could have set up? The economic stimulus you could have created with that money, hell even put it into Canada's small but decent space program, scientific research.
Question for people that read this. Why? Does anyone have the SLIGHTEST idea why we wasted an extra billion dollars on something the states was able to do with 1/51 less money?
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There are probably a few reasons for the drastic difference, and one of them is that the Pittsburgh summit probably cost a lot more than $18 million. If you look around the web what that figure includes, it's mostly just overtime pay for local police and bringing in outside police officers. I don't think it includes, for example, the military, the CIA (in Canada, the equivalent would be CSIS), etc., or even the daily wages that the local officers would have already receiving -- all of which are included in the Canadian total. Also, $18 million in Pittsburgh is only security, so that doesn't include the actual event itself. The Canadian $1.1 billion figure includes more than $900 million for security and the rest for the rest of what it takes to host to summits. So when people hold the two numbers side by side isn't comparing apples and apples.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, it still appears to be more than previous summits. I guess we'll have to wait and see when the final budget numbers come out what all that money was actually spent on (although it sounds like the bulk of that money was paying overtime for the thousands of police/military/security people in town). The police and politicians will no doubt point to the protests as a way to justify those costs, although I don't think that will satisfy people who think it's too much money.
Brother James