Could I speak about the variation of venue that you and Paul were talking about? Canadians generally don't like to see that level of security on their streets. Whether it was necessary or not, it's Orwellian. Even the War Measures Act.... People still remember how sick it made them feel to their stomachs to see armed soldiers with guns on their street corners in 1970. We don't like it.
Now, surely if you held this event at Camp David in the States, a place where you can have these things secure, or Meech Lake, or Kananaskis, or on an old military base, you could spruce it up. For $1.3 billion, you could pave the streets of an old military base with gold and build a “Taj Mahal” and have a beautiful event there for less money than we spent.
Don't you think that it would have been easier to police a pre-existing facility that's self-contained? You could have had a ring of law enforcement officers holding hands around the thing for the whole three days.