I'd also like to thank all the witnesses for appearing and taking time out of your busy lives.
From a security point of view, I think we all can agree that the G-8/G-20 meetings can fairly be described as and considered a successful event. All attendees were protected. The meetings were conducted without disruption. There were no acts of violence against any of the attendees. I think all of us want to congratulate you for accomplishing that.
What I do think that Canadians are concerned about, though, are the costs of achieving that security, and those costs I think are measured in two aspects. One is in monetary terms and the second is in terms of what I think is pretty much established now as widespread violations of many Canadians' constitutional rights, civil liberties, and democratic expectations.
I think that's what we have to measure this against: we had great success, but there were costs. I think that it's naive and that people are playing politics if they claim there were no costs that were sacrificed to achieve that security. I'd like to delve into some of those costs.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer did a study before the summits. I want to quote from the report he published. He said, “In an attempt to assess the reasonableness of security costs, the PBO identified unit costs of security personnel deployed as a unit of comparability.” What he did was that he compared, and I'll go on quoting him. He said, “Our analysis compared the unit costs of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as the Canadian Forces, for the 2010 G-8 and G-20 Summits and the 2002 G-8 Summit”. I think the reason was that he tried to get two Canadian comparators.
He found that, in his estimate, the unit cost for the RCMP in 2010 was $101,000 per RCMP officer. That compared to $25,000 for the RCMP unit cost in 2002 in Kananaskis. That's an increase of four times. The same thing happened for the armed forces, but I don't think there's anybody here from there, so I won't ask about it. Those numbers are inflation adjusted. So what he ended up saying in his conclusion was, “The unit cost allocation for the RCMP for Huntsville has increased by a factor of 4”--