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Vancouver gears up for the race to 2010 |
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| Written by Jean Sorensen , on Mon-May-2009 |
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 Vancouver’s 2010 Integrated Security Unit is launching the largest peacetime security operation ever undertaken in Canada as it counts down to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games. As Vancouver prepares to welcome the world, it is also a critical test of Canada’s best security forces and their ability to balance safety with hospitality.
That challenge is dropped squarely on the shoulders of the ISU’s RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bud Mercer, responsible for co-ordinating the massive security operations with a budget of $900 million. He steps into the role at a less than flattering time for the RCMP, as the force takes a public and international bashing over the taser death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport in October 2007.
Mercer says he is determined that security at the games will be “subtle but effective.” It’s a tall order and difficult to think of 7,000 police officers drawn Canada-wide from RCMP, regional and municipal police forces as “subtle.” But, they will assist in policing and play a supervisory role for some 4,000 private security personnel that will be deployed at venues in support capacities. Several thousand more Canadian Forces personnel are expected to assist but in a background or monitoring mode.
“I hope the Olympic family (athletes, spectators, and dignitaries) remember the Olympics and don’t remember the security,” Mercer says.
However, Olympic events pose a massive logistics and co-ordination task. In B.C., the two main venues — Whistler and Greater Vancouver — are approximately 150 kilometres apart but the actual Olympic “theatre” encompasses an area of 15,000 square kilometres, although some of that is mountain and water.
“You plan, you practice and you then have to execute the plan,” says Mercer of the preparation process. Two years of planning kicked off the plan’s 100 training exercises. The exercises were dubbed bronze, silver and gold — major events drawing together the participating security agencies. The bronze exercise involved 100 agencies “writing the script” for the event and 70 participated in a November 2008 event. It pulled together one of the largest assembly of delegates in Canada with 540 security members in the ISU offices in one day.
The silver exercise held February 2009 involved 100 agencies with 1,000 participants, including test events such as spectator screening at international events at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum and at Whistler. The gold exercise is slated for November 2009, the purpose of which is to confirm the readiness of the agencies to secure the Games, says Mercer.
Mercer’s almost unimaginable challenge is to prepare for all possible disasters. “It is a large undertaking,” he acknowledges. “It gets bigger by the month and the plan will be a lot bigger as we lead up to the Games,” he says.
Right now he relies on the 400 full-time security persons now working inside the doors of the Richmond, B.C.-based ISU office that are dedicated to Games security. They are not just ISU staff but drawn from 30 to 40 invested agencies such as municipal law enforcement and military.
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