public safety canada | Behind the Yellow Tape

The Cost of FIFA

Posted on June 10, 2026June 10, 2026 by Pete Cross

Adidas Tango soccer ball on green grass near soccer goal

This is a personal bitch. I just spent 20 minutes trying to circumvent the 1st Ave and Terminal Ave area in downtown Vancouver, a city where I live, which I have nicknamed the City of Sirens. I wasn’t the only person trying to reroute so as expected, grid lock quickly ensued. This main intersection we learned was now blocked with a sleepy looking VPD officer sitting inside his vehicle, staring at his phone, parked behind a somewhat flimsy wooden barricade, but clearly ready to pounce should a nearby resident dare to try and breach the barrier and get back to their nearby apartment. It took a few moments for me to realize, ah yes, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) security was now in place–three weeks before the 1st game. No doubt all the frustrated drivers who were trying to do u- turns were captured venting their frustration on one of the two hundred extra security cameras now in place around the stadium, which also was cocooned by 12′ high barricades.

Later that same day, sirens erupted once again and those of us sitting in our cars in rush hour were surrounded by numerous motorcycle cops, blazing by, who quickly gained the intersection, jumped off their bikes and began urgently directing traffic and forcing everyone to again divert around them. It was just another “practise” session for FIFA security. As a resident of downtown Vancouver, even as a sports fan, I am here to tell you that my patience with this city is beginning to thin.

I’m sure you haven’t missed the news that the World Cup of football (“soccer” to you North Americans) is coming to Vancouver and Toronto who are hosting thirteen games between them, starting in the merry month of June. Forty-eight countries, 104 games in 16 cities spread throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

So as I drive and encounter the various road closures around the stadium and other parts of the city, I am given quite a bit of time to ponder whether this could all be worth it.

To make some sort of assessment, I guess you need to know how much it is going to cost. Well, you will quickly learn that the cost depends on who you ask and what the authorities deem you are able to know without causing an undue security risk to the attendees. Global news recently estimated that in 2025 the cost for Vancouver was given as $624 million, while in 2026 the cost is now $729 million. Of that $729 million, they attribute $242 million to policing costs. Canada’s Parliamentary budget office recently estimated the total cost to Vancouver to be around $578 million. A disparity in measurements, but all these pronounced figures have the caveat attached that costs could go higher.

Our local mayor Ken Sim says not to worry, the spin off residual economic impact is the equivalent of “40 Super Bowl” parties, although he says it is not his job to “crunch numbers” (Ken Sim’s background prior to being a mayor is as an accountant) The other government officials involved in the Province and at the Federal level bloviate that the spinoff is about $1 billion –and not only that it will lead to an additional 100 million people wanting to visit Vancouver over the next five years.

This is of course is the same rinse and repeat arguments that were brought up for the 2010 Olympics in terms of the expected increased economic benefits and the greater visibility for Vancouver around the world. The Vancouver Olympics came in at a cost of $1.9 billion. The operational budget, was balanced off through operations. However, they did not take into account the infrastructure costs such as the building of the sea to sky highway, or the upgrades to transit, or the $603 million spent on venue development. Spinoff benefit measurements from those Olympics or at these World Cup games are in economic terms difficult to measure as they suffer from a high degree of speculative data, often based on surveys, or general measurements such as hotel room occupancy. Positive attributions can be easily skewed and FIFA organizers like Olympic organizers are often the masters of promotional accounting.

For these seven world cup games, they are currently estimating that Vancouver will attract another 350,000 visitors for the games themselves. Sounds impressive, but let’s put it in some perspective. For the last three Taylor Swift concerts that were in Vancouver in 2024, they estimate that it drew 160,000– 70% of which were from out of town. So maybe not 40 Super Bowls Mr. Sim, but a better comparison as an economic spinoff may be if there had been seven Taylor Swift concerts, which, by the way, would have likely outdrawn the current World Cup. Nevertheless, FIFA has proclaimed that there will be a world wide $41 billion economic benefit. They point to various groups which will reap in the greatest rewards: hotels, airlines, beer stocks, Adidas, Puma, Nike, McDonalds, Dominos Pizza, and $380-400 million to the advertising agencies. There is little doubt that these groups will benefit, as they did when Taylor Swift appeared on the big stage.

The big difference between the Swifties and sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup is the level and cost of security. We are much more concerned about our safety when the sporting events are on, than when the popstars arrive. In 2010 the Olympics involved over 7,000 police officers over 17 days of events. This World Cup will spread 7 games from June 11th to July 19th; 17 days of events during the Olympics versus 7 days of events for the World Cup. Yet to police the World Cup it is going to require 800 additional officers being brought in (I was told 1000 by a source) helping to fill the requirements for over 1200 officers per day. A security contingent for these games therefore larger than the Olympics.

The security bureaucracy will indeed be large. There will be an “Integrated Safety Unit” comprised of 18 agencies, including fire, ambulance, transit and “health authorities” (During the olympics they called it Gold, Silver and Bronze Command Centres). They will also be guarding practise facilities at UBC and Killarney Park, the Fan Festival, and the airport and the numerous hotels to look after the various VIP’s and one-percenters.

Dave Jones, who is head of Security for these Vancouver events and the 1200 officers per day (he is a former Chief of New Westminster Police Department and its 104 officers) outlined what he considered the potential risks during these games; “fraud, petty crimes, unruly behaviour, protecting pedestrians from vehicle ramming, and cyber attacks”. There is also a major concern over “human trafficking” and there is even a “Human Rights Action Plan” to insure “non-discrimination” against “un-housed residents”. He proudly added as further assurance that the RCMP will be using “drone detection technology” and the roof will be closed to avoid any foreign drone attacks one must presume. Some will argue that global tensions are different in 2026, than say the Olympics in 2010, that could be true, but this is still a sporting event, and one has to wonder how much is too much.

I fervently believe that this unprecedented level of security for a series of football games is an almost self fulfilling prophecy. One could argue that if the goal is to prevent any level of concern, then there is an infinite amount of security that can be undertaken. To the casual observer it does seem that the more the merrier theme is currently running rampant through policing and security in our current environment and in the various police agencies–what once took two, now takes six. Has it reached what I believe to be a ridiculous level of caution? (FIFA recently announced that you cannot bring refillable water bottles into the venue, as a caution as someone might bring in a bottle containing poison which they would throw at the players).

The other big question of course is who is paying? Well in essence you the taxpayer and the people that purchase tickets. (My last check of ticket prices showed a price of $400 for a nose bleed section ticket in a game between Australia and Turkey and the average room rate at a hotel was $900). Public Safety Canada (you the taxpayer) is going to kick in $100 million, and Vancouver is going to use the 2.5% hotel tax, referred to as the MRDT, which has been in place since 2023 (to date the tax has generated $105.7 million.) Sports Canada (also you the taxpayer) will kick in $116 million. So the cost coverage will be generated by taxes from hotel goers and then tax dollars spread over various levels of government. Of course, the actual cost as we stated before seems to be fluid. We must be reminded that the Olympic security budget was at one time estimated at $175 million and went to $900 million, but hey all is forgiven.

So who is complaining, other than we locals? The police officers involved are not complaining. They will all be on overtime trying to get that down payment for the house. The officers who have to make up for them being gone from their regular duties may complain. The members of the general public who are often docile and silent seem to be accepting of the fact that nothing changes, everything just gets bigger and more expensive, including policing and those ticket prices. The acceptance of this level of funding gets a little more blurry though if one considers other spending priorities. For instance, if we assume that we will be spending roughly $700 million for the ability to watch 7 games; we could instead build 46 elementary schools, pay the annual salary and costs of an additional 2,333 police officers, or buy 35 million single dose bags of heroin, or 3.5 million grams of fentanyl to be given out at Vancouvers’ safe supply clinics. Or if we assume a cost of $35,000 per person for a private addiction treatment facility, that would be enough money to care for 20,000 people.

Clearly, its’s always a matter of perspective and who will benefit. Who is paying is not a mystery, how much the total cost will be still is. Of course this is not a concern for FIFA or apparently for our various levels of government.

So welcome to Vancouver all you avid football fans and most of all stay safe.

p.s. the Federal budget watchdog, now estimates the cost of FIFA Canada wide as $1.06 billion or $82 million per game.

Productivity

Posted on April 3, 2024 by Pete Cross

One of the recent headlines in Canada originated from a speech given, in fact it was termed a “blunt” speech, by the Sr. Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada Carolyn Rogers. The speech centred around the drop of productivity in Canada in relation to other countries, in particular the U.S. and the G7. She described the weak labour productivity in Canada and said that in fact it had reached levels that should be considered an “emergency”.

Productivity in the economy is defined traditionally and measured in economic output per hour worked. In 1984 our Canadian levels were at 88% of that of the Americans, but in 2022 we are at 71% versus the Americans and we are lower than the G7 countries with the single exception of Italy. Again, the speech was one dealing with purely economic theory– productivity down, labour costs up, prices up, and the continued growth of inflation. However, this led to the question of whether or not productivity can be measured in policing or in the wider legal system.

Can labour and its level of efficiency be measured in policing, or at least to some degree? There is labour, there is time and there is an output, even though it is not an economic output? Can it be as simple as a calculation such as number of officers up, crime up, therefore police productivity down? Public Safety Canada does not even use the term productivity. So it can probably be assumed that currently there is no measure of “productivity” in terms of individual officers, or as officers in terms of a particular unit. Public Safety Canada and other police agencies, instead use the term “performance”.

There are two major differences in productivity versus performance . Performance is both qualitative and quantitative while productivity measures the impact or output of the work done and the labour resources employed.

The Federal government indicates that there are both direct and indirect measures of “performance” in relation to policing. They say direct measures are such things as crime rates, number of arrests, fines issued, clearance rates, and calls for service response times. They say “indirect” measures include, surveys, observations of social behaviour, situational studies and independent testing. I am going to ignore the latter measurement tools, the indirect tools, because it would seem to be a much more subjective set of tools and would be a lengthy topic all on its own.

In terms of direct measurement tools, there are some units in policing which are easily measured such as calls into a dispatch centre. For instance, they measure time response in answering emergency 911 calls. In the last stats reported by E-Comm , it was on average 5 seconds or less. This despite there having been an 11% increase in calls for service. A good result, with a positive spin. On the other hand they do not measure how long a non-emergency call takes; such as reporting a break and enter, or how long that person may wait on hold under those circumstances. Nor do they give statistics on how long before an officer even attends a break and enter, in fact in the cities, they may not even attend– often telling the victim to send in the details. This is just to say, measurement tools can be flawed, in-complete or mis-leading and can often be tailored depending on your viewpoint. But the fact that there are some measurements in place in terms of performance is re-assuring.

In a different example, in September 2023 report done for Police Services concerning the CFSEU (Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit) was obtained by a freedom of information request by the Vancouver Sun newspaper. In that report the agency came under heavy criticism. In the 123 page report it was stated that the agency “is neither effective in suppressing gang violence and organized crime nor is it providing the Province with an adequate return on investment”. A damning statement but what seemed more interesting is that they clearly undertook what must have made some cost/benefit analysis of the work being done by CFSEU– and clearly found it wanting. The report had been undertaken after a spate of murders, such as the one at Vancouver International Airport, and the shooting of Tequel Willis, who was only 14 but already a member of the Brothers Keepers. At the time and with the required concern expressed with this increase in blatant and brazen murders, they announced the launch of “Operation Spectrum”.

The review however, found that Spectrum operation “had no investigative component and only amounted to increased intelligence sharing between agencies” and that the entire project “fell short”. The report went further and said that “there are issues with CFSEU’s leadership and senior management model…and…a lack of continuity in policies and procedures”. They even added that their mandate wasn’t even clear. This is no small unit, there are 440 officers assigned to CFSEU, and they have an annual budget of about $90 million and are primarily responsible for gang activity in British Columbia. It is a large unit that according to this study were vastly under performing.

The CFSEU managers when questioned by the media weakly replied that they had not received a copy of the report. Is it possible that Police Services had this report, and were simply hanging on to it, and never felt the need to act on it? For the record the agency has been led since 2021 by A/Commissioner Manny Mann, who by default also oversees the Organized Crime Agency. One would have thought that there would have been some sort of repercussions coming from this report which was issued back in September 2023, when the questions were clearly pointing at the lack of performance, productivity and the eventual measured outcomes. As this is being written, so far nothing has been done and there has been no public accounting or explanation offered by the RCMP upper levels, who must have got a copy of the report by now.

Is this a measurement of the individual members of CFSEU? Not really, we can not draw that conclusion. Most everyone who has some insight into this unit knows that there are members of this unit who are hard-working, spending countless thankless hours and many night shifts trying to keep tabs on some of the many gangsters who run about this Province. That being said we also know that there are some members in that unit and other government units, who have their feet up, enjoy the overtime, and dream of a lucrative retirement. Let’s face it, every agency has the players of the system, the ones who are around for a free ride, the officers always being the “backup” car to keep away from the paperwork, and those that don’t simply like to leave the office.

We also know that the hard workers, the often quiet ones who toil away and make little fuss often go unrewarded. Promotion is “allegedly” based on performance, yet time and time again a great many of the laggers still find their way up the chain of command. One often is forced to the conclusion that performance is not being measured accurately or with any consistency.

Another complexity to any kind of measurement is the fact that there are many officers doing many different jobs sometimes inside the same unit, with different skill sets and different mandates and efficiencies. How do you measure a group who write warrant applications with another group that spend the majority of their time doing surveillance, or others who may be doing strictly administrative jobs.

Individually, every year every officer of the RCMP is subject to a Performance Review. It is assumed that municipal agencies have some similar process. In the RCMP the immediate supervisor outlines the good and the bad of the individual sitting before them. It is completely subjective and therefore often falls prey to individual likes or dislikes. Every supervisor also wishes to keep their charges happy, especially in this age of victims and apparent unlimited stress leaves, so inevitably these annual documents are positive. They are also rather lengthy documents and every supervisor dreads having to complete them. I have seen and heard many supervisors tell their underlings to write their own document and they will just sign it. Measuring performance in this atmosphere and style is clearly problematic and many would consider it as a form of process an abject failure, yet it has survived for decades.

Then consider the unlimited numbers of sections in the RCMP and to a lesser extent the municipal agencies, and how does one compare performance or productivity between all of the various Provinces and specialties. How does one measure the productivity or performance of someone on the Musical ride, or in Media relations, and how would you compare it with someone in uniform answering calls in Prince George or in Bella Bella or in London, Ontario. The pay structure however is uniform. All of the same rank make the same salary regardless of the unit, or the importance of that unit to the overall policing mandate. Performance or productivity does not factor in to how much one is paid. One can easily see the problem and the level of complexity. It is just as hard to find any willingness or intent to change it, or even make an attempt to measure it.

Public Safety as stated earlier, for the most part simply report on performance, they do not act or comment on those performance measures. They do direct measurements through such tools as the CSI (Crime Severity Index). If we glance at those statistics, the CSI was up 4% in 2022 the highest since 2007. Violent CSI, a different index also rose, with Robbery up 15%, Extortion up 39%, Homicide up 8% and sex assault up 3%. Non-violent CSI which applies to such crimes such as property theft is also up 4% and motor vehicle theft is up 24%.

The “volume of crime” index shows an increase of 5% to 5,668 incidents per 100,000 population. In any view, these statistics do not seem to lead one to believe that performance in policing is on the upswing, in fact it would be easier to assume that they are in fact trending negatively. However, there is no real accountability, except when for some reason a light is shone on one particular problem. In Ontario recently it is high end car thefts. An officer at a community meeting gathered some unwanted attention when he recently suggested that the public keep their keys by the front door to limit the damage from home invaders trying to steal keys. The message seemed to be, we can’t catch them so it is up to the public to limit them. Not the best statement if one were talking about trying to measure performance.

The usual answer you get when police executives face these poor numbers is to always go to the standard answer of it being due to dwindling resources, not a poor performance. In that, there is some but limited truth. In May of these same years, there were 70,566 officers, 406 more than in 2021– but still representing a 1% decrease, largely due to growth in population. Does a 1% decrease in resourcing explain the reason for what most would consider a poor performance?

This blog has always maintained that productivity and performance of units needs to be measured. In this age of sophisticated and minute data collection, one would hope that it is becoming increasingly possible and at some point there would be some attempts made to judge efficiency. It would seem key to having any viable and fully functioning organization. It also seems more necessary now than in past years to have some form of cost benefit measuring tool. There are many problems currently facing policing, but this should be considered one of the major issues, along with the need for much greater transparency. It has been plaguing policing for decades and at present, disappointingly there is no indication that they are yet willing to consider change and truly embrace the constant call for modernization.

Photo courtesy of Flickr commons by Mark Dyer – Some Rights Reserved