Thank you.
With reference to how long the planning process took, in the fall of 2008, Superintendent Charlebois and I, along with the Canadian Forces, started planning the G-8. Almost two years of planning went into the G-8--and of course the G-20 at the same time, once we found out about it. As I'm sure you've already heard from many people, it was the largest deployment of security personnel in Canadian history. The actual number was 20,974, so close to 21,000 security personnel were deployed.
The biggest challenge we have in this country, even as opposed to other countries, is the size of our country. We have a massive country from which to draw security forces, which creates logistical challenges. As you can imagine, we all--the OPP, the RCMP, the Toronto Police Service--needed assistance. None of us is big enough to take care of this with the people we have stationed here in Ontario, so we had to draw on people from all over the country. That means airplanes, buses, accommodations, and meals.
Even though the summits themselves took place only over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, in some cases we had people on the ground a month in advance to start the clearing processes and the sweeping processes. A lot of our people, the majority of them, were there at least 10 days in advance. We had to house and feed and take care of those people for all that period of time.
Those were just some of the challenges. We've never been faced with anything like this before. Two summits at the same time generated a security force that was unprecedented. I could get into specific numbers about specific agencies and those kinds of things. I have all of that, but it's safe to say that we put forward an operation of a size that we may never see again.