Prince George, B.C. – There are now just thirty-three days remaining until the kick-off of the 2015 Canada Winter Games in the Prince George area.

The 17-day competition running February 13^th through March 1^st will be the largest sporting event ever held here, bringing together athletes and visitors from across the country, a legion of dedicated volunteers and plenty of attention from national media.

Given recent outbursts of horrific violence in unexpected, unconnected locations anywhere on the planet, examples of just how tenuous security can be in 2015, we asked 2015 Canada Winter Games CEO Stu Ballantyne to discuss security preparations that have been made for the games. The motive for our article, as explained to Ballantyne, was not alarmism but quite the opposite, reassurance about security and safety, based on what he would presumably have to say on the issue.

Asked about the challenges of setting up security, Ballantyne says “first of all multiple venues and lots of extra people in town, so certainly from a capacity point of view we’ve had to utilize our volunteer groups, all of the different agencies whether it’s the RCMP, Emergency Management British Columbia, the City, Regional District, the Province, everybody who would be involved in delivering a safe and secure event.   All that said, we can only deal with what we know and we can react based on how our planning goes.”

“We have a series of four planning sessions that we’ve done with our venue teams and all of our planning volunteers. Involved in those exercises were all of the various government agencies and the RCMP, the fire department, BC Ambulance along with the rescue agencies and all of the emergency planners involved in high-level issues, whether they be earthquakes and those kind of items that the province and all of the various governments have to deal with on an ongoing basis.”

Ballantyne says ‘we’ve tried to integrate the Games into their plans. We’re not really different we’re just, we have a few more people, so if we’re working on evacuation plans at the swimming pool we just need to know that there’s an extra five hundred people in the building and how do we deal with that.”

“But we have a series of volunteers in pass control, volunteers is spectator services, the venue staff that would be there on a regular basis. We have a private security firm, International Crowd Management, that’s helping us. We also have Chef de Missions, which are all the people that run the various provincial and territorial teams. And everybody’s interlinked to the communications process through the physical structure we call the Games Operations Centre, or GOC, and that reporting relationship out to the venues is ongoing and throughout each day.” He says morning and evening meetings are held each day to go through and deal with all of the issues.”

“Ballantyne says all of the systems have been well-tested “to make sure everybody at least knew the basics of the communications structure and then how that works, so once the communications are in place, we’re able to deal with issues as they come up and we’ve identified potential issues and mitigation towards that.”

The CEO says something that is very helpful is that expertise from previous games is brought forward to new host committees. “We’re not the first Canada Games we’re the 25^th Canada Games to be executed in this country so we have the advantage of transfer of knowledge and best practices. And lots of our staff come from other forms of special events and so there’s a number of communications plans and emergency response plans that we have in place.”

“We didn’t want to re-invent anything we wanted to integrate everybody so we brought everybody collectively together and built that communication around each other. When there’s a fire the Games don’t respond to a fire, the Games respond to the fact that there is a fire and we go from there. We’ve been quite comfortable with how everything is going and all of the agencies have a very, very good understanding that the Games are, it’s a different time because of the number of people here, but at the end of the day the police police the city every day and the fire department protects the structures every single day and we just wanted to integrate and weave into that.”

Asked what the Security budget for the Games is, Ballantyne says “because a lot of it is delivered by the volunteers with the pass control, the actual out-of-pocket payment is substantially less than what the overall coverage is, but we’ve got a couple hundred thousand dollars that we’ve had to put into just supplementing our volunteer program with private security. I couldn’t tell you what the entire budget is because what we’re responsible for is the private security and the volunteers, and volunteers come with different types of expenses. They come with training and orientation and uniforms and feeding and those kind of things not directly associated with security.”

Security levels will be higher at some Games venues than others. “There’s no question that the Opening ceremonies, Closing ceremonies and the medal rounds at the hockey games will have a greater attendance so the security is always based and the number of volunteers based on how many people would typically be in the crowd. And so we’ve done measurements towards that and factored that in and we have the ability to move and adjust. If we have an event that all of a sudden have an event that gets very, very popular, more popular than we expected then we would move people and resources around.”

What happens in the event that something unexpected occurs? “Each one of the venues have an overlay team called a Venue Management Team of volunteers and they have a team leader who knows how to report that into the Games Operations Centre, and the Centre has the liaison with all of the various agencies outside of the Games in order to get resources there.”

“I mean there’s still the 9-1-1 system if there was something to come into play and there’s a way of us communicating and dealing with the issue at hand. We have to be prepared for the unexpected but we don’t know exactly what the unexpected is going to be so we have scenarios that are built and it’s more about communication than anything else to make sure that we are aware and then we react to that with the various agencies that are in place.”

Ballantyne says he feels quite strongly that they’re in good shape security-wise right now, that everyone who needs to be in the loop is well-versed. He says there is still plenty of work to be done before the GOC goes operational five days before competition begins, and says if things need to be ironed out there will be time to do so.

Asked whether security for the Games has been stepped up at all in the wake of recent global events Ballantyne says “there’s no question that the dialogue between the various agencies has increased. A lot of these scenarios were already discussed. The likelihood six months ago was way less than it is today, but the likelihood is still very unlikely on the grand scale of how we’re planning for things but we still have to plan that if it does happen how are we going to react. So we’re very aware of recent events, not only in Canada but around the world, and certainly the RCMP have a different deployment based on what’s happened in Ottawa and certainly their discussions with us have increased.”

The Canada Winter Games committee is responsible for security in partnership with the Prince George detachment of the RCMP. Communications NCO Cpl. Craig Douglass says “they’re responsible for security but we will be doing a number of components as the police of jurisdiction, and certainly we will have resources in place to support security efforts.”

Cpl. Douglass says “if something criminal happens at a venue, maybe there’s an assault or a theft or something, we would respond as the police of jurisdiction in that area but we’d be working with Canada Games in terms of how that impacts the public. We would be dealing with that like we would a concert, a hockey game in that sense except we’ll have more resources in place and available if needed. You’ll see there will certainly be an increase in police presence, especially in the venue areas.”

As well Cpl. Douglass says “there will be a contingent responsible for the highways, especially between here and the ski mountains. There will be busses of athletes heading out there so there will be a large component in that sense too.”

However he says the commitment to the games will not deplete other policing services to the city. “We’re not going to impact General Duty policing so if you’re a resident of the community and you have a call for service you’ll get that call for service like normal, or quicker because there will be increased resources.”

He says he’s not going to discuss numbers or where the resources are coming from. “I can tell you that none of the officers in Prince George are on leave during that time, we’ll all be available and/or working.”

Cpl. Douglass says a communications plan should be in place next week and following that information will be released to the public “to basically outline our duties, what will be involved, and to let the public know that we are involved and it will be a safe games.”