Thank you very much, honourable chairman and committee members. It's a pleasure to be here today.
As the chairman said, in my former role I spent ten years on the Vancouver Organizing Committee, first on the bid as we were bidding, and then with the organizing committee. The ten years were fantastic, and my responsibility as vice-president of sponsorship and sales was to raise all the corporate money to offset the operating budget of the games. I was also responsible for the development and strategy and the execution of the torch relays.
Today I've been asked to focus on the torch relays and corporate partnerships, which I will do. I'm excited to be here because it takes me back to 2001, when we had this dream of celebrating and winning the right to host the games, and then really looking to engage Canada. And we sat down and thought, how are we going to do this? The starting place, which is where I think the healthiness of forming this committee is, is the critical starting point for us to form a vision, to form a very clear vision.
I probably would not have joined the organization had it not been for their vision of our games. We wanted them to be Canada's games. I was not going to join the organization simply to host a two-week sporting Olympic event and a one-week Paralympic event. It was going to be more than that. If we won the right to host the games we had the opportunity to engage Canadians, to inspire our youth. And we very clearly, in the early days--and that was 2001, so nine years in advance of the games--formulated the vision.
In 2003, as you know, we won the right to host the games, and that thrust us into really solidifying that vision. That vision was absolutely to walk the Olympic spirit through the homes of all Canadians. We were very clear about that vision.
My encouragement to the committee for the celebration of the 150th anniversary is that before you start thinking about program parts, it's essential and critical that you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. Your vision will form the foundation and the platform. It will weave the DNA into all the programs that you ultimately do.
That's what we did when we sat down and started to talk about what Canada's games mean; how we could achieve that goal of engaging the nation, inspiring our youth, and bringing future generations into the fold and bringing about a sense of pride and patriotism. In the bid we did a lot of research and we asked Canadians what success would look like to them in 2010. Canadians told us a couple of things, but a few rose to the top: we would welcome the world like never before, we would be Canada together welcoming the world, and we would host flawless games. The other thing that rose to the top was that our athletes would be supported and they would get to the podium. So we knew what Canadians wanted that would make the pride surge.
So off we went. We had our vision and then obviously the next step was to put the strategic plan together. As we all know, the strategic plan combines all aspects of program elements. What were we going to do, specifically, to achieve this? That's the stage this committee will be heading into, to create that vision and that strategic plan.
One aspect I'll focus on was the torch relays, for which I was responsible. We sat down and decided that program was a critical aspect of achieving our greater vision of engaging Canada. Again, this program unto itself was just one aspect, one component of our overall vision. But it was a very big component, as hopefully most of you saw the flame come through your communities.
We started the planning and the visioning for the torch relay in 2004, six years in advance of the games. Planning takes a lot of time. Obviously when we planned properly and created the vision, we knew what we wanted to achieve.
So I got a team together that was going to lead the torch relay, and we mapped out where the relay would go. We were quite excited, because as we all know, this fantastic country of ours is large. We were determined to reach 80% of all Canadians. We mapped a route on which 80% of Canadians would be within a one-hour drive. We were pretty proud of that plan. We went in and presented, and the leader—as many as you probably know, John Furlong, said: “What about the other 20%? Andrea, we have to go coast to coast to coast; we have to get to more Canadians than 80%.” The end result of our torch relay was that we reached the point that more than 95% of all Canadians were within a one-hour drive.
That takes planning and thinking. The planning that went into the torch relays and into the way we engaged the nation was through focus groups across the country. We talked to all stakeholder groups. From tourism to aboriginals to athletes, we polled people across the country as to what this torch relay would look like. We looked at such things as inclusivity; we looked at all aspects. We knew that if this was to be engaging enough to engage Canadians, we had to get right into the roots of Canada: we had to get into municipalities and small communities; we had to have government involved at all levels, municipal, provincial, and federal; we needed to engage the nation at all levels from coast to coast to coast. That's what we went about in our planning. It took six years to plan that torch relay and be able to go out and flawlessly execute the plan.
As many of you know, the torch relay was the longest torch relay in Olympic history. It lasted 106 days, and every day we had two celebrations, a lunchtime celebration and a nighttime celebration. As you all know, when the torch arrived from Greece and we travelled around and across the country, that torch touched over 95% of Canadians.
You can imagine that in the smallest community the Olympic day was the day that the torch passed through their community. Every day, twice a day, those celebrations were their Olympics. My team of more than 250 people had to put on their A game every day, because every celebration was an Olympic Games to the community we were in. As I sit here and recount, I am shivering. Every day people thought, we'll come out with a jump start, and then it will calm down. On not one of those 106 days were people not lining the streets. People in wheelchairs were wheeling out of hospitals at 5:00 in the morning. We witnessed in the dark of the night young kids, old senior citizens, people of all ages with flags lining the streets as the flame would go through communities, from one to the next to the next.
As you can imagine, my team.... Operationally I knew we were sound; I had an unbelievable team. But who motivates the motivators? I was on and off that relay making sure of the emotional side of my team, who were working day in and day out, including Christmas Day—and I was with them on Christmas Day. They worked tirelessly, but I had to make sure, as you will for the team that puts together this production for the 150th birthday, that the team were flawless in their strategy and their execution.
We know the results of that torch relay. By the time the torch reached Vancouver, this country was galvanized from coast to coast to coast. But It takes time and planning.
The last area of importance that I want to touch upon is the critical role of corporate partnerships. Corporate partnerships played a vital role.
We can't say that the people who were in VANOC were the cause of the success of the games. No, it was about all of us. It was about government partners; it was about our corporate partners. Our corporate and government partners played a critical role in the funding. We like to say that we got out of the sponsorship game and into the partnership game.
Our target when we submitted our bid book to Prague was to raise $453 million in corporate partnerships. Many thought we were crazy: how could we ever raise that kind of money through corporate partnerships in Canada? As you know, as we won and did the budgets over, the budget went to including $765 million that we had to raise in corporate partnerships—and during the recession of 2008—and we did it.
How? We did it by forming strategic partnerships. We formed partnerships with companies that had like visions and values to ours, and in our whole Canada game strategy, which was our vision, we knew that the Bells and the RBCs of the world wanted to align with something that included their customers from coast to coast to coast, which is essentially how and why we were able to raise that kind of money to support both the games and the torch relay.
I close my ten minutes just saying that the parallels between our games and the celebration of our 150th anniversary are very close. But in summary, the critical aspects are to ensure that government create a vision that is solid and clear and directional, because what that vision does is put your stakes in the ground, whereby you spend money that is important to achieve your vision and don't spend money on aspects that are not going to help you achieve your vision. And it is critical that your strategic plan be done well in advance.
I'd suggest that today's date is a very timely point for this committee to get off the ground and start informing the process for an incredible anniversary in 2017. I believe that as we look back to the past.... I remember 1967, with my passport, as a young child, and to this day—I was very young—it resonates with me.
We think of what the games did to unleash the pride in Canadians. Imagine what we can do in 2017 while we bring the events of the past and those generations that are still with us from the past and take that product and infuse the younger generations, so that we can absolutely harness what was done in the games, what has been done in our past, and add that equity to a brilliant celebration in 2017 that we can all take forward and thus make Canada an even better place than it is today.
Thank you.