Mounties, police officers earned $80 million in overtime during Olympics: Documents

Damian Inwood, The Province August 25, 2010 5:42 PM

Police working on Olympic security racked up a whopping $80 million in overtime during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games. Documents obtained by The Province under Access to Information legislation show $47 million in overtime was paid to about 4,300 RCMP. A further $33 million in overtime was paid to roughly 1,700 police officers seconded from other Canadian police departments, as part of a $159.5- million “professional services” tab. “At the end of the day there was a lot of overtime, there’s no doubt about that,” Supt. Kevin Debruyckere, the RCMP’s Integrated Security Unit operations officer, acknowledged Wednesday. Debruyckere defended the overtime costs, saying police had to balance the need for resources with keeping home units up to strength.

“There’s only so many police officers to go around,” he said. “ It’s not like it was [at the Beijing 2008 Olympics] where there was an unlimited number of police officers within a couple of hundred miles. We had to pull people from right across the country.” He said that one challenge was the length of the security operation. “It was really a struggle to deploy that many people for that length of time,” he added. “Compared to the G8 or G20 in Toronto, where people were gone for a week, this was a 30-day deployment. On a day-to-day basis we staffed each of our venues and our sites with the resources that we needed and some of that included overtime.” The documents showed that $31 million was paid by the ISU as regular RCMP pay to “non-federal” cops. Debruyckere said that didn’t include wages which were already being paid to Mounties from Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and RCMP headquarters. “For example, we would have paid an RCMP member from Alberta,” he added.

The documents also show that $106.9 million was spent on travel. Debruyckere said travel costs included about $85 million for accommodation, including three cruise ships. About $5 million was spent on air travel, including expensive charter flights needed to get RCMP home when the Games were over, he said. The ISU’s portion of the $900 million total Olympic security bill was originally budgeted at $491.9 million. It included $177.5 million for regular pay, secondments, overtime and benefits, $306.3 million for operational costs, including accommodation, meals, travel and fuel and $8.1 million for capital costs such as radio equipment and vehicles. Debruyckere said that while the final Olympic security bill is still being finalized, it will come in under budget.

“We’re going to be left with this legacy of debt in all kinds of different ways and police overtime costs is just one more example,” fumed Maureen Bader, B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Federal NDP Olympic critic Peter Julian complained that getting the true cost of the Olympics is “like some kind of water torture.” “If overtime is paid out, it’s because things have not been set up properly in the first place,” added Julian, NDP MP for Burnaby-New Westminster. “The problem is that each of these budget envelopes add up to what is a frighteningly-high figure.”