Thank you, Mr. Chair, and merci to members of the committee for having two members of the G-8 and G-20 research group testify before you on separate occasions. I am pleased to follow my colleague, Jenilee Guebert.
In assessing the security performance of Canada as a G-8 and G-20 host in 2010, three key standards stand out. The first is a comparative record of Canada and other summit hosts since 1975 through to the latest Seoul summit in November, recognizing the unique challenges that Canada confronted in 2010.
The second standard is Canada's success in meeting the many security requirements, above all for the leaders and their delegations, and then in turn for others producing the summit, for uninvolved Canadian citizens, for summit protestors, and for those suspected of breaking the law.
The third standard is the cost to Canada of ensuring such security and reaping the many other benefits that hosting such summits bring.
When these standards are considered by scholars of such summits, such as myself, even while the evidence continues to evolve, the conclusion seems clear at this stage. Canada, as host of the historic 2010 twin G-8 and G-20 summits, produced a near perfect performance on the central security requirements at an appropriate cost for ample reward.
The first standard of comparative performance requires complete consideration of the unique context that Canada confronted in 2010. Here, the fundamental fact is that for the first time in G-8 and G-20 history, Canada had to host two summits together and to do so in separate locations on one weekend in the summer. This produced the triple challenge, as you know, of securing the Muskoka G-8 site, the Toronto G-20 one, and the transportation corridor in between, as well as the larger areas over longer times, where those intent on disruptive violence could plausibly strike.
Second, unlike the first two G-20 summits in Washington and London and the third in Seoul, both Canadian summits took place beyond the national capital, which is routinely secured for the conduct of the host government's ongoing operations and visiting leaders year-round.
Third, Canada, unlike all other G-8 members save Japan, does not maintain large standing security forces financed from regular government budgets and well trained for the special security requirements that summits bring. The RCMP had the unusual burden of providing security for the Vancouver Olympics earlier in 2010, and in June, there was an expensive need to assemble local police forces from across a large, geographically dispersed country to train with those they had never worked with before, and to serve on a summer weekend in Ontario in prime vacation time.
Fourth, in the lead-up to Canada's 2010 summits, there was ample evidence of deadly terrorist attacks in several G-8 and G-20 states, with Russia and India standing out in this regard.
In the neighbouring United States, on both sides of Toronto, in the six-month lead-up to the summit, al Qaeda-like attacks that almost succeeded occurred in New York City and Detroit. Also relevant may have been the memories of the recent arrest and subsequent conviction of some of the hometown “Mississauga 18”.
These events may have raised the question, as arose when Canada hosted the G-8 in 1981 and 2002, of whether the President of the United States in particular would come to Canada for all summit sessions or even come at all.
In the face of such formidable challenges, Canada, on the second standard of the actual performance, I think put in a near-perfect performance on the core requirements--not all involved.
The first requirement is the physical security of the summit leaders and delegations. All invited leaders trusted Canadian security enough to come to the G-8 in Muskoka. The two who missed Toronto did not do so because of security doubts. All attending leaders and delegations had no visible disruption to them or their summit in any way, in striking contrast to the G-8 summit afflicted by terrorist attacks in Britain on July 7, 2005.
The second requirement is the physical security for others producing the summits, including the service personnel, the accredited media, and the security forces themselves. Here, the only defects in June seemed to come from minor injuries suffered outside the security perimeter by some of the security personnel involved.
The third requirement is the physical security of the uninvolved surrounding citizens, both at the time at the sites and also elsewhere before and after the summits took place. Here, Muskoka had a virtually perfect performance. The defects in Toronto, with only three injuries initially reported by emergency management services, and in the rest of Canada compare highly favourably with the G-20 2009 London summit, where an innocent passerby was killed at summit time. They also compare highly favourably with the G-8 2001 Genoa summit, where mail bombs injured Italian officials before the summit took place.
The fourth requirement is the physical security of the peaceful protestors. In Muskoka, it was, by all accounts, a virtually perfect performance. In Toronto, a few were hospitalized or seriously injured. Regrettably--and I say this genuinely--there was some physical pain, negative ongoing psychological effects, and inconvenience from the police dispersals arrests.
The fifth requirement is the physical security of those engaged in or intent on violence. At Toronto, it appears that minimal force was used in this regard.
The sixth requirement is deterring or pre-empting any violent assaults while permitting the peaceful protests routine in any democratic polity to take place. Here, I think the twin summits did well in this regard. They certainly compare favourably with the Seoul G-20 summit.
The seventh requirement is preventing any summit-associated attacks from outside the country, attacks that cause damage and death in or around the summit host. Here, Canada's twin summits had a perfect record. Some doubt that the Seoul G-20 did, in the aftermath of the event.
Next, Canada's successful security performance came at an appropriate and affordable cost. This one can conclude from the outstanding transparency of the Canadian government in offering summit-specific and largely complete cost estimates well before the summits were held. and the actual expenditures soon after the event.
You know the figures by heart, I suspect. They equal, in actual expenditures, about $429 million for each summit, if one simply divides the overall cost equally between the two.
Estimating the actual costs of G-8 and G-20 summits is a highly formula-sensitive exercise. However, the high point for the G-8 alone appears to have been the Japanese-hosted Okinawa summit in the year 2000, which reportedly cost $750 million in year 2000 dollars.
For the G-20 summit temporally closest to Toronto, that in Seoul, Mark McDonald of the New York Times, on November 10, the day before the Seoul summit started, described preparations as “extravagant” and concluded that: “Korea is not throwing its G-20 party on the cheap.... The organizers have declined to estimate the total cost”.
Beyond the basic requirements of securing the summit, several broader costs and benefits should be calculated before an overall assessment of the cost-benefit balance is made.
One benefit is the unique opportunity afforded for training many police forces from across Canada to work together for the first time to confront a mass emergency event.
A second subsequent benefit is the consequent improvements in procedures in response to the lessons learned about the positive and negative from the summit events.
A third benefit is the enhanced global image of Muskoka, Toronto, and Canada. In the case of the 2005 G-8, Scotland, host of the 2005 Gleneagles summit, calculated large direct economic benefits, even with the deadly terrorist attacks that scarred that summit. As Huntsville was a similarly small, remote, and globally little-known location, it will likely reap large benefits from the largely favourable publicity it received before, during, and after its summits.
This is especially so as, like Toronto with its “Toronto terms” on debt relief from its summit in 1988, Muskoka mounted a peaceful summit from which two globally appealingly named “Muskoka initiatives” came: one on maternal, newborn, and child health; the other on improved accountability to help ensure that G-8 leaders actually deliver on the promises they made.
In the case of the G-20 summit, the most recent estimate of the overall long-term branding benefits comes from the Seoul summit, by an agency of the Korean host government itself. They claim an impressive $28 billion in overall branding benefits. It is interesting to think what the comparable figure for Toronto would be. I would guess that it would be on the net positive side, but again, we need really comparable and transparent methodology to know.
One of the bases for my judgment is that the disruptive violence was much more reported by local media at the time of the event than by the international media at the time of the event, and certainly subsequently that compares with the favourable portrayal of Toronto in the lead-up to and increasingly after the event has long passed.
Beyond, of course,—my penultimate point—lie the policy benefits produced. Over $800 million to physically produce the summit, but Muskoka did deliver $7.3 billion in new money to save the lives of 1.3 million mothers and babies in the poorest places in the world. For the Toronto G-20 summit, the benefits start with containing the euro crisis erupting in Greece, and thus preventing the economic damage from its global contagion, damage that could have done considerable harm to the Canadian economy and our neighbours around the world.
