Transcript of John Furlong's speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade - November 18, 2005

Good afternoon everybody and thank you very much for coming today to share this time with us. We’re very happy to be back in front of the Board of Trade and I’d like to thank the Board of Trade for making it possible for us to speak directly to the community I’d also like to recognize the directors from VANOC who are here, who work very hard to help us with the project that we’re trying to steer in the right direction. Many of you are friends that have worked in one way or another to help us be successful, and on a day-to-day basis you cover our back and look after our interests, and in places that we don’t even know.

I also want to recognize my teammates, my colleagues that Justin spoke about. We have a wonderful team of people who are hugely dedicated to the work that they’re doing and I would also like to recognize the men and women of sport in the community who are the reason we all do this in the first place.

My job today is to try to give you some insights into where we are with the project—you’re going to learn some new things about what’s going on and what the challenges are, and what the road ahead looks like. And I’m going to be moving at a fairly hectic clip because I want to get as much in as I possibly can.

In a nutshell there’s 1539 days to go to the opening ceremonies, they’re still on the 12th of February, 2010. And this is a date that — this 1539 days is the sobering piece of information that we all get every morning when we come to work. It’s one more day gone and the project is moving like a rocket ship. Seventy-seven days to go to Torino. And Torino is very significant for us because it’s the last winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games there will be before Vancouver 2010. So our team will be going there to learn everything we possibly can from that experience.

Our team size this time last year was quite small. Now we’re at 150 people. They are from about ten countries and speak roughly in the order of 20 languages, so we’ve become a very international team. Many of these are Canadians obviously, but who are originally from other places, or their families are from other places. So we’ve got a very international team which is really what you need to have to do this job effectively.

This time next year we will have grown from 150 to 300, and the team will continue to grow rapidly until 2010 when it will be at 1,200 full-time, 3,000 part-time, probably 20,000 to 25,000 volunteers to deliver the Games, and anything from one volunteer to 10,000 who will be volunteers for the opening and closing ceremonies. We’ll be one of the biggest companies in the country by the time we get to 2010. So we have to be fairly good at what we’re doing.

It’s been an interesting thing this year, because we’ve spent a lot of time trying to sow the seeds to have a great team, to build a perfect team. And one of the things that we wanted to try to do is to make sure that we could keep this team together with our partners all the way to 2010. What happens often with organizing committees is they end up being spread all over, and it’s hard to keep morale together, it’s hard to keep the culture together. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about culture, about how important it is that we are a real team, a model team, a team that deserves to be supported by the community. We’ve recruited, you know, fantastic people.

And one of the things that we do—by the way, this is our new building that you see here on the screen. We found this building through the cooperation and good graces of the City of Vancouver. This building is attached to another one. And all of our partners and the
Organizing Committee will move into that building which is at roughly First and Boundary Road. We’ll be developing a full Olympic campus on that site. It’ll be a very exciting icon building. And in the building we’ll have the seven partners, the two major governments, the City of Vancouver, Whistler, Richmond, the Canadian Olympic Committee, the Paralympic Committee, the RCMP, and others who become our partners between now and the end. This will be a very exciting place. You can see this building from far around. We’re very, very proud of it. And we’re now working to renovate and prepare that building to move into it in the early part of the spring.

One of the things that we talk about a lot and we’re consumed with is our—the values that we have adopted to be the values of the Organizing Committee. The values that we have embraced—and you know, companies spend a lot of time thinking about this--we spent an excruciating amount of time thinking about what the values at VANOC had to be for us to be successful, for us to be great. And those values are: teamwork, trust, excellence, sustainability and creativity. And when an individual joins our team we put them through a values test. We need to know that every person that comes to work on this initiative has the soul, has the heart and has the ability to survive in a very frenzied and challenging environment. So, we have an obsession with building that culture because we know ultimately, unless we are an inspired organization, we’ll have great difficulty in keeping the community support as we go along.

Why these values? Well, teamwork, it’s easy. You know, we have to have a great team. We have to have everybody singing off the same sheet, working together hand-in-hand. And we spend a lot of time practicing this. And teamwork is sometimes not easy to define, but you know it when you’re looking at it, and in our organization we have an obsession with that. And what we’re really trying to do is to be good enough at it that others will want to join. So today we see all of our partners, we see everybody as being members of the team. This is not about an elite group of event organizers in one building in Vancouver, but building a team that ultimately we hope will encompass the whole country. That everybody will feel that they’re a part of it, and they’re sharing in it.

Trust. For us to be seen as one of the better organizing committees of all time, people have to believe in us, they have to trust us, they have to think we have integrity, they have to believe that we speak the truth, that we model the truth, that when we make a mistake we apologize, that when we mess up that we do something about it. So trust is a very, very important part of it.

Excellence. Because obviously the project requires us to be great we are raising the bar on many things. We have to be good at absolutely everything. There is just no room in this project for mediocrity. There’s no room in the project for bad mistakes. We have to be very good. So our team is very focused at looking at every little detail, and going back again, to ask ourselves, “Is this as good as we can make it?” We’re looking for perfection so that the project lives up to the expectation that the world has of Canada.

And then we have creativity. And creativity is this one little area where we can get a real edge over what’s happened before. It’s looking at something differently and trying to bring the spirit of creativity to it, and asking ourselves, “Can we present this in a different way? A more efficient way? A more spectacular way? Can we raise the bar with something, some new innovation?” And Canadians of course, pride themselves on innovation and so creativity is very important. We have huge mountains to climb, huge challenges, and we need our people to look at things and ask themselves, you know, “How can we possibly get this done? What is it that we have to do that we haven’t thought of to make this particular problem go away?”

And then sustainability. Sustainability touches three areas for us. There’s obviously the environmental sustainability requirements for staging the Games, the social and the economic. But in a nutshell it’s about really, how we behave. It’s the legacy we want to leave as an Organizing Committee. What is everybody looking at? Have we lived up to the expectation of including everybody? Have we embraced all of the cultures and all of the sectors of the society that might be left out in a project like this? And sustainability has also become a day-to-day obsession of the Organizing Committee, and I hope it will be one of the things that we will be remembered for long after the Games are over.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the Vancouver 2010 brand, and what will it be about us that will be special? Why will the world look at us and say, “There goes a great organization.” And we have developed what we refer to as a brand essence. I refer to it more as the inner core, the culture of Vancouver 2010. And rather than try to take a flyer at describing it for you, I’m going to read it for you.

“Vancouver 2010 creates a climate of possibility that helps everyone discover the greatness inside themselves. It wakens us to the idea that we are all giants inside. It challenges us by asking: how good do you want to be? It encourages us to dream bigger, to reach farther and to leave something lasting behind for others. Vancouver 2010 is an open invitation for everyone to share in the Olympic and Paralympic journey. To find and step up to their own podium. It is about creating everyday champions—every day. From sport and the arts to technology. From education to volunteerism, our 2010 story will be about the Games you can touch, not just the Games that touch you. Celebrating the possible is an inclusive commitment that pays equal respect to both personal achievement and winning. Vancouver 2010 gives every dream a field to play on, a podium to strive for. There is no clock but the one you set for yourself. There is no competition beyond which you—but the one that you invite. There is no victory but the one you feel in your heart. Vancouver 2010 shares with the world what is possible. When a country embraces the values of equality, freedom, sustainability and global responsibility, and is inspired by the challenge to live by those ideals fully and completely. The Olympic and Paralympic Games remind us all of our potential. Vancouver 2010 is our opportunity to show the world what we can do, and what we can be if only we will try. Vancouver 2010 is a celebration of the possible.”

This is what we’ve adopted as the culture. This is the kind of team we need to build and are trying to build at Vancouver 2010. To give you a sense of what’s going on inside the organization. We’re extremely proud of the work we’re doing, and we’re very proud of the way our partners have embraced us.

Now, the year has been an exciting one. It’s been a challenging one. And we’ve gotten a lot done. We’ve spent quite a bit of time, obviously, preparing for the heavy construction that comes next year. But the program has already started. We’ve been working in the Callaghan Valley, which you’ll see here on the screen, which is the site for three of the athletic venues. And we have completed $14 million dollars of work in there. And everybody knows what the climate is like, and if you read the paper every day you sometimes think the sky is falling when it comes to construction. Well we’ve put our heads down and we’ve worked very hard to try to get through 2005 and be fully and completely prepared for the real heavy lifting that has to come.

In the Callaghan Valley where these three venues are to be built—one for biathlon, one for cross-country skiing and one for ski jumping, we hired a small First Nations contractor, RBVLP Construction (Resource Business Venture Limited Partnership) from Pemberton, to do the first pieces of work. The work started ahead of schedule, was completed ahead of schedule and it was completed under budget. And that project has now been shut down for the season. We’ve done a lot more that we thought we could do and we’re very, very happy to say that that project is in good shape and our team is now focused on getting back to the design, the final detailed design, so that when we come out after the winter, that we are fully and completely prepared to execute this project the way it needs to be to keep it on time and on schedule as we go forward.

So that focus is very, very keen, every day. That’s the full and complete obsession of our construction team. Over on Blackcomb Mountain, we’re building the sliding center, which is a very complex facility, very unique, and there are not many ways at this facility to refine design. It is exactly what it is—one fast track down the mountain. At that site we did about $6.5 million dollars worth of work preparing for next year. The contractor we hired, Emile Anderson Construction, is a very inspired contractor. They’ve done a terrific piece of work, finished right on time, and we saved about $700,000 dollars on that piece of work.

And again, our focus now is on design and really tightening this up to make sure that we’re ready and that every single thing we need to get done before we go to construction has been done so we’re fully prepared.

Now, one of the exciting things for us about these two pieces of work is the contractors themselves. The people that are coming to work on the project recognize that we have to deliver at a spectacularly good level in front of the world. So these contractors have joined forces with us and are very aware that this work must be done well, and we must send a message to the world that we’re on top of it, that it’s under control and so far our experience has been great.

The next project is the Richmond Oval, and as you all know Richmond is building this venue. It’s a spectacular venue and this is a fantastic partner we have in Richmond. As you know our investment in this project is capped at $60 million dollars. But what Richmond did here was, they saw a vision for themselves. And what they’ve done is, while they’re building this—this is the latest architect’s rendering by the way, of the Oval, which will be one of the most spectacular buildings of its kind in the world. It’ll serve winter and summer sports after the Games. But for the community of Richmond, whereas it will be a fantastic Olympic legacy, it will also serve the community’s needs for generations in a whole range of areas. It’s in a spectacular location on River Road, looking right across to the airport. And the work has started, the site work is ongoing. The community has decided to add some elements to this building, which will make the building a more sustainable building and a better building for the community. But again, our investment is still $60 million dollars, and they have retained Dominion Fairmile to manage this, and so they’re in the hands of a formidable contractor and we’re again on time and moving in the right direction. Their work over the winter will again be to really tighten down the design so that they can build the way they need to going forward.

We all know it, we’re in a frenzied marketplace for construction. We’ve been told that at this minute, there are something in the order of $70 to $75 billion dollars worth of construction projects that are on the books for the next three years in this region of British Columbia. This obviously creates great challenges and our worry going forward is labour availability, cost escalations, and having places to house workers who will work on the projects in Whistler.

It’s a worry for us that our project was—the budget for our project was done in 2002 dollars, and escalation today for projects that are being built today is running at 40 to 50 percent. Now what we’ve done is, rather than spend our time worrying about that, we’ve just gone back and looked at our project and just got very serious about making sure that what we’re building we have to build, and we’ve looked at every means at our disposal to be creative. And over the course of the last year or fourteen months we’ve saved about $85 million dollars out of the original program to mitigate against this very significant challenge. Some of the things we did were, we moved the broadcast center which was originally planned for a facility in Richmond, we’ve moved it downtown, saved $15 million dollars, improved the quality of the Olympic Theatre and made for a far better television experience for the project as well.

We’ve tightened up the design dramatically in the Nordic Center, in the Callaghan Valley, reduced the complexity, changed the design a lot—still have a fantastic Olympic venue, but we’ve worked hard to try to take out elements that are just simply too challenging to build. We’ve taken about $5 million dollars out of that project, out of the Callaghan as well by building only the ski jumps that we need for the Olympic program, so there won’t be summer jumps after the Games.

Now, all things considered, our team right now is, we’re buttoned down, we’re working hard, and we expect to achieve a top-of-class result with our construction program. We expect that when we’re done, when it’s all finished and done, that you will be quite proud of the work that this team has done, the things that they’ve achieved, the things that they’ve been able to do. We’ve thought of all kinds of ways to tackle these challenges because that’s what’s expected of us. So the designs are being, as I said, really tightened up. We are absolutely determined that no contractor will work on this project who is not prepared to get into the trenches and work with us to make sure that we get absolutely the most out of each of these projects that we can. Everyone is focused on the same thing. We have to get these contracts committed early, get them buttoned down to reduce the danger that costs will go up even further and we have to continue to find the best people we can to work on these projects to manage them, to secure them, to protect them as we go forward. We’ve even sat down and are sitting down with the steel and concrete industries to find ways that they can help us to reduce our costs so that we can perform at the level that you would expect of us.

Over the course of the last fourteen months, starting with the announcement of the Bell Canada partnership with VANOC—and Bell has been a terrific partner for us. Over the course of the past fourteen months we have signed up six major corporate partners. We have gone far beyond anything that we thought we would do. At the early days we thought we probably wouldn’t raise any money until Torino was over. But as we went across the country and talked to these companies and CEOs about the vision we have about making this about our country and about all of Canada we were stunned at the response and how hard companies tried to meet the needs that we had to become a partner in staging what we hope will be the best Olympic and Paralympic experience of all time. They’ve made an extraordinary cash commitment to the project. And one of the unique things that’s occurred is that in each of these companies their employees have become everyday Ambassadors for the Olympic and Paralympic Games across Canada. These young men and women, old men and women who live in small and large towns all over Canada are delivering messages every day about what we’re doing that we could never do on our own. And so these companies have taken on that responsibility as well as others that I’ll speak about in a second.

Each one of them has embraced our concern that the athletes be supported properly and that we have the team to beat at the Games in 2010. So in every respect they have been extraordinary. You heard from Justin—Bell was our first partner and they have been in every respect a model partner. Their job is a very tough one, it’s about making it simple and having a flawless plan and flawless execution. They are faced with the challenge of making sure that there is not a single, not a momentary interruption in the services that are needed to stage the Games—they’re very technology dependent and they’re doing a wonderful job. Then there is RBC who may well be the oldest Olympic sponsor in the world—they certainly are in Canada. They’ve been supporting Canadian athletes since 1947. And again, a fantastic partner and we’re very, very proud to have them. They are currently rated the most popular company in Canada, most respected company in Canada.
HBC, George Heller you know, who was the CEO for the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, and his whole team at HBC have become great friends of ours at VANOC. They’ve made an unprecedented commitment to athlete support in advance of the Games, and one of the things that they just did, they’ve just launched the new uniforms for Torino which are now in stores all across Canada—they’ve opened up hundreds of Olympic shops all over the country. It’s a first for a company like this to do, it’s a first in any country. But the fact that they sat down with a team of designers, with Canadian athletes from coast to coast and talked to them about what these uniforms had to look and feel like is a credit to the way that they do business. They have been, again, a great partner—they’re fully engaged in helping us stage great Games.

Rona, their company motto is, ‘Helping make dreams come true.’ Rona has made an incredible commitment to us, and as a sidebar, their whole strategy, their growth strategy across the country, becoming a wholly Canadian company, is all around the Olympic Games. Last week we attended an event of theirs in Montreal and there’s tremendous excitement about the power of the Olympics in that company. And they’re providing us with cash and raw materials for venues and are very, very heavily involved in the delivery of the project.

PetroCanada, Energizing the Games. Unprecedented support for Olympic athletes—they’ve been doing it since 1998, and you’ll all remember the job they did on the torch relay in Calgary. We’re very proud of our relationship with them. And then General Motors. General Motors is the most recent contract we signed. Their commitment to the Games is in the order of 6,000 vehicles that we need to deliver flawlessly on our transportation requirements. And in that commitment is a huge commitment—I think it’s 30% of hybrid vehicles. We will achieve the high water mark for sustainable transportation because of that commitment. We’re very proud of it, and they’re very proud of it, so we’re very happy about this.

Now these are very different kinds of partners than we thought we would have. For them this is not so much about marketing rights and about exposures and about ads in the paper. It’s about being recognized as companies that care about Canada. It’s about embracing the whole culture. It’s about being fully engaged in the day-to-day problem solving that’s required to put on the Games. Partnership is a very major theme for us at Vancouver 2010, and we take full responsibility for building as many of them as we possibly can. We have great partnerships with our two governments. We have great partnerships with the municipalities of Vancouver, Whistler, West Vancouver, Squamish, Richmond—I mean, just wonderful relationships that we have with these communities that are working to help stage great Games. We’ve got a wonderful relationship with the Canadian Olympic Committee, the Paralympic Committee. Patrick Jarvis is here today, who just got elected to the international board of the Paralympic Committee. And we have a wonderful and growing relationship with our First Nations partners from the four First Nations and our sponsors. And now we’re beginning to grow these relationships to other provinces.

A really interesting thing happened recently where, you know, we spent a lot of time talking to the Territory—the Nunavut Territory before we launched our emblem. And high up there in the High Arctic they have a dream about being involved in the Games. And they’re very proud of it. And recently the premier of Nunavut came to our offices to talk about how he could get artists and painters and others from his Territory to be involved in the cultural program that will be developed around the Olympic Games. They have a dream of being involved, of participating, and our job is to make that all work.

And interestingly for us, recently we heard about a group of young school children, and these children who are well aware that the Games are on down here, decided to have a fundraiser with their teacher and go build an inukshuk quite near their school. And they got all these rocks, built this inukshuk, raised I think it’s just above $50,000 dollars, and they flew to Whistler. And they went down to Whistler and they put that inukshuk up outside the information center in Whistler to send a message that they want to be involved, that they’re engaged, that they’re watching. And they did this without any invitation from us—we didn’t know anything about it until the last minute. But it gives you a sense that everyone’s watching us, everybody is paying attention and wants to be involved very much in the project. We felt very, very good about it.

So over the course of the coming months we hope to bring all of the provinces onto the team so that we can live and breathe up to the promise of being Canada’s Games. You all know that--one of the provincial agreements that we signed recently was with the Province of Quebec. This got a lot of attention. We’re very, very proud of this, because you know, we are a bilingual country and we do need help with a lot of things. The Province of Quebec has a vision of what the Games can mean to them. This agreement covers a whole range of areas including language, sport, culture, business procurement—all kinds of things that they can help us with and we can help them with. We’re very excited about it. It was the first one we’ve signed and it’s led to quite a lot of interest across the country to bring other provinces onside.

You all no doubt, over the past month, read about the challenge we had with ambush marketing. What we refer to as ‘ambush marketing,’ it’s not a very nice term. But you all know that we had a challenge that we took on in a very public way with Esso Canada, and Esso Canada had a program that we felt was in violation of the rights of PetroCanada, and we felt that they were using an association with the Olympic Games that wasn’t fair. And we went out there and we did what we thought was our job to try to protect our sponsor and protect our project. This is extremely important work. And it got a lot of attention, and it was obviously extremely controversial. But we have a big job to do, we have to raise north of $1.7 billion dollars to stage the Games, and this money comes from four places. It comes from marketing contracts that we sign in Canada, ticket sales from the Games, television negotiations with the IOC, revenues from television negotiations and funds we get from international marketing partners of the IOC. This is it. Those are the only areas that we can generate revenue. And we have to achieve a very high level of support to be successful. And our sponsors need to be protected. They have really risen to the occasion, and this is something for us all to care about, and so our job will be to protect them.

It was interesting this week, because we’ve just come back from a three-day tour of northern British Columbia and we visited First Nations communities and other communities who have been watching what’s going on, and wish to be involved in the Games. And one of the areas where we believe that there’s a chance for us to have a real edge in 2010 when it comes to tourism is in the whole area of Aboriginal tourism. Some of the work that’s being done around the province is quite spectacular. And when we were talking to these Aboriginal leaders, they were telling us that their art, their paintings, the carvings and all of the work that they’re evolving—and some of this is magnificently—being done by magnificently talented young artists, that this work is being plagiarized, it’s being copied in other countries and it’s being brought back to Canada and North America and being sold as authentic. This is sort of in the same area for us, and for us to be good at this we have to do our job thoroughly. So as we go forward we’ll be spending more and more time making sure that the marketplace is kept clean and that our sponsors are being protected. This is work we simply have to do, or the cost to the Organizing Committee will be significant.

So our revenue target, and as I said, it’s—you know, it’s north of $1.7 billion dollars. We’re, at this point, as we look to the future and we are waiting to see what the Torino experience looks like, the full and complete focus of the marketing team led by Dave Cobb is to generate as much revenue as we possibly can, and we have to be trusted. People have to know that we will live up to the promise that we make when we sign on with our partners.

So another area that has been on the front page more often than it might be is the whole area of security. And security is a great headline maker around the world around the Olympic Games. We’re in the fortunate position that we got great advice about how to organize for security way back when we went to Salt Lake City. We were told that we needed to put security in the hands of one central command. That one central command is the RCMP and it is their job to coordinate and bring all of the security agencies together and be the lead agency. And they are getting that cooperation and everybody is working with them. What’s happened for us, which is fairly unique, is that these officers that are working on the project are sitting beside our planners in our facility working at developing security strategies for 2010. So, they would sit down with our team, and look at how venues are being designed—every little detail is being looked at to make sure that we are developing the least expensive but most effective security strategy possible. And we believe that because of the agency, the RCMP, which are one of the most revered security agencies in the world, because of their talent and their ability and their experience with big events, that there was an opportunity to leave a legacy for the Olympic Games because of this piece of work.

For us really, this can’t be about security. We can’t be spending our time talking about buying more airplanes and submarines and buying security equipment. We’ve got to be talking about athletics, about sport, about bringing the Games back to what they are about. And this is also the belief of the RCMP. And the worry we have is that the agenda will get ambushed to some degree by outside forces, by a lot of what I would call alarmist rhetoric about, you know, stories that are planted by folks who stand to make lots of money by being involved in this area. And our job is to protect our program, look after it—and we can get it done, we have the people to get it done. And so that’s the focus of our team as we go forward, to work and to work cooperatively with the other Olympic cities to manage this area of the project as well.

About a year ago we had a sort of a discussion in the community about what we referred at the time as an accord. It was referred to in the media as an accord with labour. Today we refer to this as a community alliance, and when we talked about the idea of getting organizations to come together to support the Games, including labour, you know, it made lots of headlines and people were criticizing us for doing it and thinking we were doing something that in fact we weren’t doing. In a nutshell let me tell you what we are doing. What we are trying to do is to get every agency, every entity, every organization—labour, business, government—anyone who can help us build the right environment, to help us build that. So we’re talking to anybody who can help make sure that when the Games are on, that we’re all ready for it and that we’re all pulling in the same direction. And let me say that so far, everybody is cooperating. We’ve talked to business leaders, we’ve talked to labour leaders, we’ve talked to government, we’ve talked to all kinds of agencies who believe this is absolutely the right thing to do, to get the whole community to come together. This piece of work is being led in our team by Donna Wilson.

And at the end of the day, here’s what we hope will happen. The Games are coming and when they are, as it’s coming closer, that we will all look at the Games as special, and that the Games will never be allowed to be put in harm’s way by anyone. During the recent strike that we had on the waterfront, millions of dollars of Olympic products were sitting there for weeks. If that happened to us during the Olympic Games we would be very heavily embarrassed around the world. We can’t have that happen. So what we need is a highly motivated community—we’re all in this together. So if we can get everybody to support that idea, protect the project, see it as special, then the legacy that we get from doing this piece of work will be a fantastic one.

So, it’s not about construction and it’s not about making any special deals and it’s not about wage rates or extra benefits, it’s about getting everybody to look at the Games and remind themselves that the world is coming and that we all need to be at our best.

During the bid days, we talked a lot about economic impact and we placed a lot of numbers out there, and they were heavily debated and argued about. And we’ve just come back, as I said, from the tour up into the North where the economy of the province was heavily depressed. And I can tell you that based on just the experience we’ve had in three days, every community that we’ve been in has a 2010 deadline. Everybody has projects and things they’re doing that cap off at 2010. And so 2010 has become quite a focus for the province. And recently RBC came out with some forecasts, some analysis on what’s happening in the economy as a result of the Games—today. And the economic impact of the Games today, based on these numbers, is in the order of $2.1 to $3.3 billion in 2005. This is higher than we thought it was going to be when we were talking about this back a few years ago, and the theory is that this is going to repeat itself all the way to 2009, and we should even see a higher spike then, because that will be when the tourism elements start to kick in. Much of this impact today is in the area of construction and stuff that has been organized with a 2010 deadline in focus. As you get to 2009 and you look at retail and hotels and hospitality and tourism, Aboriginal tourism and so on, it starts to have a different feel to it and the numbers will come from other sources. But it’s a very powerful catalyst, I think, that’s happened. We’re obviously very happy about it.

In our situation, looking forward, we’re going to let about 10,000 contracts, about 10,000 between now and the execution of the Games. We’ve let 300 or so already for a cost of about $93 million dollars. And so the Games are having an impact, and for us, you know, we get blamed for the good piece of that, and we get blamed for the bad piece of it. But it’s working, and the challenge for us as a community and as a province is going to be building on this, and making sure that when the Games are over, that we’re able to continue this and continue to grow the effects of this for years to come.

The province’s goal is to double the tourism budget—or the tourism impact by 2010. That would move it from $9 billion to $18 billion. That would be a staggering outcome. But because the Canadian government has moved the CTC to Vancouver, working cooperatively with tourism agencies in BC, this may well indeed be possible. So we may be in for a period of economic growth like none that we’ve ever seen before.
Now, there are many challenges ahead for us. I’ll just give you a touch of what I would refer to as the mountains that we still have to climb. One of the areas that’s got us a bit worried is in Whistler where we have a concern that we will have enough accommodation for the people of the world who are coming. In Whistler there are hotels and then there are other accommodations there where we have to secure rooms almost one at a time. And what we need is to secure every single room. Our team is working literally around the clock trying to tie up as much of that property as possible. This has turned out to be an incredibly tough challenge for Torino. For us it’s a challenge we have to overcome. So in the next year we have to find a way to get all of that accommodation secured and under contract so that there are no doubts around the world that we can deliver at the level that we promised.

In Vancouver, we have all of the accommodation that we need, and most of the contracts have been signed and we’re in really good shape. For the venue program, clearly as we’re getting into the heavy lifting next year, we’re going to have to be very, very, very good. We’re obviously worried about cost escalation, we’re worried about the things that are going on, and we’re going to work extremely hard over the next four or five months to get the kind of result that you would all expect of us.

We get asked a lot about--do we know what our costs are going to be. And we’ve been working hard. We’ve got a very experienced financial team in place, and we’re working very hard to refine our costs and our numbers and getting all of that pinned down. But these numbers really will not be that relevant until we’ve seen Torino. We have to go to Torino, we have to analyze what happens in Torino, apply that experience against our estimates, and then by the third quarter of 2006 we will have the first real cost budget that we feel good about, that we’d be prepared to say—this is the budget that’s going to guide us all the way to the end. In the meantime we just continue to refine with the information that we have.

One of the big challenges next year will be the television negotiations with the IOC, making sure that we get sufficient revenues from the television pool of dollars to support the Games. Obviously a big challenge for us is to continue to protect our reputation, to be seen across the country as a good company, as an honourable Organizing Committee that people are prepared to support and follow. And a big challenge for us, by the way, is Torino itself. We’re putting a big team on the ground in there, but we’re also taking up eight minutes of the closing ceremonies. At those closing ceremonies we’ll begin to tell Canada’s story to the world. Everybody will be watching—it’s an opportunity for us to communicate to five hundred to a billion people, so it’s a very intense period for our team to get ready for that, so, and you can expect us to be you know, putting something on there that will catch the attention of the whole country.

One of the areas that we have spent time on that people have asked us questions about is what’s referred to across the country is “Own the Podium.” Own the Podium was a decision that the Canadian Olympic Committee and VANOC made together to support Canadian athletes so we have a great team at the Games. It’s, in a nutshell, it’s like this—up to now Canadian teams have come and gone to the Olympic Games and every time we’ve come home in recent memory people have said there’s not been enough money to support these young men and women in pursuit of their goal. For us, we looked at this and we thought, well, this is a bit like building a spectacular movie theatre with great seats and a fantastic screen and sound system and not caring about the movies. The rest of this country will expect—they will judge the Games on the basis of how our athletes do. So along with the Canadian Olympic Committee we have launched this initiative called ‘Own the Podium.’ The federal government has put in $55 million dollars, the province has put in $10 million dollars, and our team has gone literally door-to-door and our sponsors have all pitched in to try to find the money to get the team ready. It’s a very important piece of work. It would be a shame to go all the way to the end and do this incredible job and not have supported our team.

I want to show you a little piece of video tape here about ‘Own the Podium’ to give you a sense of what it’s about. It’s really—this is about taking science, it’s about giving our athletes the extra tools they need to go the final inch. This is what this money is about. So let’s roll the video.

[VIDEO]

So that work has started and we’re now very focused on trying to have the best Games ever, the best results ever. You know, it’s always great to come here and talk about what we’re doing but more than ever, we’re heading into what will be the toughest year we’ve had yet, next year. Our team is going to grow rapidly, we’re going to be moving to our new offices—very exciting. And our challenge to you is to find a way to give us a hand, to help us wherever you can. And whether you’re involved as a volunteer, or whether you’re with one of the companies that sponsors the Games, or as a partner, whatever, to find a way to give us a hand, to cover our back, to support what we’re doing—to get involved in this in some way and to help us be successful. We want help from anyone who’s prepared to give us a hand.

I thank you for listening to us today. I appreciate the opportunity to come and talk to the Board of Trade, you’ve been great friends of ours, so back to you Dennis. Thank you very much.