Canadians are divided on many issues of the day, but one thing they seem to have found close to unanimity is the senseless cost of the G20 Summit later this month. Surveys indicate that over eighty percent of Canadians think the cost is far too much for what is largely a three-day meeting of leaders of twenty countries. The Canadian government seems to feel it’s time to show the world that we are in the big time, whether we can afford it or not. $1.2 Billion is the current figure being thrown out, and some officials are indicating this as just the “taxpayer cost”.That would be you and me.

One-point two billion, for what is mainly a three day meeting. With a security budget exceeding the weeks of the Vancouver Olympics. Although just the sound of over a billion dollars is apparently enough to trigger anger in Canadians, the numbers are large enough that we can’t even grasp how that equates in real terms. Spelled out, it is $1,200,000,000.00.

Even my calculator doesn’t like it—runs out of digits before I can get 1.2 billion in the window. Fortunately the little calculator in Windows is capable of handling that kind of number (Bill Gates needs the capability), as long as you’re careful with your zeros.

So how can we look at that kind of money (taxpayer money) in terms we can understand? How about realizing that there are apparently about 13 million people in Canada making over $10,000 a year (the only number I could come up with indicating how many of us are paying taxes). If we do our time-ses and goes-intas on that figure, we can see a basic fact that the G20 Summit will cost, on average, each and every Canadian taxpayer almost $100.

Now admittedly the cost is not for only twenty people to attend. With their entourages, and the representation of a number of countries who are not actually even in the G20 list of most influential countries economically, the total of visitors is about 20,000. But divide that, and you still come up with $60,000 each person for a three day visit.

The bulk of the cost is apparently security, which is at a level that can only be called crazy. Some of the conference, for leaders of a limited number of the most influential nations (G8), will take place in the rural area of Huntsville, an easier location to control in comparison to downtown Toronto, but not capable of handling the twenty thousand. In Toronto, for the larger group, they have installed a ten-foot high chain link fence circling the core of the convention and hotel area being used, a significant area of downtown streets, with a further perimeter beyond that. Garbage cans, postal boxes, and even trees have been removed from the critical areas (larger trees can hide people; small saplings might be uprooted, or their stakes used by protesters). Travel is cut off, of course, and hundreds of businesses are about to be closed.

Let’s get back to our gigantic number. What could the government have done otherwise with this kind of money? (When they do dumb things, it’s always good to think of what else they could have done… and in this case, it helps put the gigantic figure in perspective.)

Could they have thought of the lack of exercise in our Canadian youth, and bought a bicycle for every child in Canada about under the age of twenty?

Given twelve thousand agencies in Canada $100,000 each to further their good works?

Our new local high school, built in 2006, cost $12 million. Could have built a hundred of those schools around the country—not bad for a conference of three days.

Roads? They used to say that a highway costs about a million dollars a mile (probably a kilometer these days, though it doesn’t have the nice sound), to that could be 1200 miles of new Canadian roads. That’s not re-paving—could do a lot more of that, sorely needed in parts, that’s building completely new roads.

Housing for the poor or homeless? Around here, where housing costs aren’t your downtown Vancouver levels, a modest no-frills home could be built for $100,000. Lay the footings for twelve hundred of those, or purchase mobiles. Not bad for a three-day meeting.

We just had our ferry service between Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and Maine cut off because of the reluctance of the provincial government to fund the ferry service. That supplement was $6 million a year. Tap into the three-day conference funding, and the ferry could have been supported (let’s ignore inflation, people)—stand back—for two hundred years! Or, British Columbia took delivery of three similar Cat ferries a few years ago for an inflated $150 million each—hey! Buy eight of the boats!

Helicopters? Long has the Canadian navy waited for replacements for the aged Sea King helicopters. In 2005 the government ordered twenty-eight new Sikorsky helicopters, and years of support and training, but of course, they cost money—big money? How big? Buy ten of them for the cost of the three day meeting! Or buy a few of the larger Chinooks for our troops in places like Afghanistan, so they won’t be bumming rides from other nations, or walking on roadside bombs.

And the worst comparison of all . . .

When we throw our money about, when we spend lavish amounts on “things’—even things like conferences of leaders who are largely there for politics and photo-ops, whose deputy ministers who actually know the finances will meet quietly later this years and maybe do something meaningful—when we spend on these things, my mind often tries to translate money into lives.

We support some World Vision foster children. It costs us $40 a month for a child, which provides food, water, clothing, and contributes to the village education system, village sanitation, medicine, agriculture, and many other things. Stick that figure in the three-day conference number, and think about it when everyone has gone home, in only a few days from when they arrived, when the street-sweepers are pushing brooms around, and the fellows with pliers are struggling to take down the chain link fences: Canada could have dramatically changed the lives of a hundred thousand children for at least a year, or nearly seven thousand children for the entire rest of their childhood.

Does it put the figure into perspective, as Canada attempts to show off for the world?

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