These are the best numbers we could come up with through the Library of Parliament.
But I did some math. Even paying an RCMP officer $40 an hour, which is roughly what their charge-out rate would be, for $500 million you could hire 500,000 RCMP officers for three days. That's 10 times the entire armed forces of Canada. We know the real number was more like 20,000 police officers and RCMP combined.
This is what got Canadians frustrated. They're just astronomical numbers that don't really make sense. Even when you do lay it out logically--here's what we budgeted for RCMP and here's what we paid for--you could buy 500,000 of them for three days for that amount of money. People are just.... It makes their blood boil to think of this.
How do you explain a $500 million bill for--what would it be, maybe 10,000 officers? How many RCMP officers do you think were on the ground during the G-8 and G-20?