Patriot Hearts (17 page)

We were even getting negative comments from some elected officials who were pretending they were caught by surprise. Both levels of government knew all along that our original construction budget wasn’t going to be enough because it was in 2002 dollars and did not factor in inflation and rising costs. They knew. We told them enough times. Although I understood the politics of some of the public remarks, it didn’t make them any less galling to swallow. My team felt pretty beaten up and for good reason.

I could have responded to some of those comments, but doing so would have meant throwing our government partners under the bus, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. In part, I think politicians in both Victoria and Ottawa were feeding off concerns the public had about costs and whether we were going to complete the project on time—or if we even knew what we were doing. If the public was unhappy with us, ipso facto it was unhappy with the government.

I spent a great deal of time talking to Jack about this problem. He knew the construction business inside out and had great instincts. We agreed that something dramatic needed to be done, a seismic event of such significance that it would help rebuild public confidence. After a great deal of soul-searching we decided to sign a new head coach for the construction team.

Jack and I both admired Dan Doyle, who had recently retired as B.C.’s deputy minister of transportation. Dan was highly regarded and had successfully spearheaded a number of high-profile provincial initiatives. I first met Dan during our discussions with the government over the Sea to Sky Highway. He had come to Prague for our closing presentation and had a real spirit for the Games. He was a guy who instilled confidence in people and organizations. He was solid, no-nonsense, composed, durable, trusted and respected. We knew he would have a calming effect on the organization and help dissipate the growing panic about our construction program. We knew he could hit the ground running.

As a bonus, Dan knew the inner machinations of the B.C. government. His appointment was going to give us instant credibility in Victoria and probably get government officials off our backs over the cost of the venues. Personally, my plate was overflowing. I just wanted to sleep at night knowing the construction program was in the hands of someone who could deal with any issues that might arise, who would not accept failure. An unflappable, stoic commander.

This meant removing a great guy in Steve Matheson, who was incredibly capable and had done a stellar job on the construction side. Dan Doyle said as much soon after he’d had a chance to assess where things were. Unfortunately, Steve wasn’t able to instill public confidence in what was going on in the way we knew Dan could. Informing Steve of the change was one of the tougher decisions and conversations that I would ever have with anyone, especially as I had earlier convinced him to abandon a great career to join our team. He deserved to cross the finish line with us, having given his heart and soul to the project. It was heartbreaking to ask for his keys.

Dan’s presence on the team had the immediate desired effect, inside the organization at least. He took bear-trap control, declared the construction program sound and then quickly appointed a quarterback for the indoor venues and another for the outdoor ones. He was adamant that all construction would have to be done within our revised $580-million budget and declared victory on that number. The two levels of government eventually approved the $110 million in extra funding. The new budget was the one our organization believed we should be measured against. This was an important distinction, because we planned on saying we had constructed the venues on time and on budget. Others would disagree.

AS GOOD AS
we tried to feel about the direction we were heading, there always seemed to be a challenge or mini controversy around the corner.

In September, the provincial auditor general released a report by Pacific Liaicon, a subsidiary of construction powerhouse SNC-Lavalin, which was commissioned to look at our building plans. It questioned whether our $580-million budget was going to be enough to deliver a venue package that the
IOC
was going to be satisfied with. The auditor general said in another report released at the same time that the true cost of the Games should be pegged at $2.5 billion and not the $600 million the B.C. government was saying was the cost.

Needless to say, the opposition New Democratic Party jumped on the reports, suggesting they pointed to mismanagement, planning errors and cost overruns and harkening back to the massive debt piled up by the City of Montreal for the 1976 Summer Olympics. I thought this was blatant gamesmanship. They did it because they could.

I met with Harry Bains, the
NDP’s
Games critic, one morning at the Waterfront Hotel and outright accused him of making up facts. I used pretty strong words to remind him of the damage he was doing to the Games by spreading fictitious information. Harry would hang out in our lobby after press conferences looking for the cameras, and when he found one he’d sound off on us. It didn’t matter what we did; it was never good enough for Harry or his party. He would just swing the bat as hard as he could and it didn’t matter who he hit in the process.

A few days after the auditor general’s report, there was a front-page headline in the
Vancouver Sun
suggesting that people were calling for my head. This was mostly based on
NDP
leader Carole James’s statement that I should be fired in light of the reports released a few days earlier.

It rattled me a little, I won’t lie. I expected more respect from Carole James, who had never asked for a walk-through of our finances. It burned me even more that the auditor general was sounding off and yet had never once asked to meet with me or members of my team to talk about the facts. It all felt pretty cheap and opportunistic. We had no choice but to sit there and absorb the blows.

Although the temperature around the project seemed to be rising, I felt that we were on the right track. I could see miles of progress that others couldn’t. I tried my best to drown out the background noise, focus on the job and look after my team, which was vicariously under attack too. What else was I going to do? We had a strong set of values upon which we were trying to build the whole organization. And during troubling times like these, it was those values of honesty and decency and trust and hard work that guided us. My dad used to say, “When your world is falling apart and people are saying bad things about you, and the walls are caving in, to survive you must ask yourself the one and only question that matters: ‘What is the truth?’ That will sustain you.” He was right.

All I could do was continue pushing forward. If someone decided it was time to change the
CEO
for the Games, I had no control over that. What I could control was my ability to lead, be a good example to my troops and continue to work my butt off from five in the morning until I collapsed in bed at midnight.

IT WAS A
little-known fact that during the bid phase we had allocated a certain amount of our construction work to First Nations companies and crews as part of Aboriginals’ broad participation and partnership in the Games. There were certainly some doubts within the organization about the capacity of First Nations companies to construct at this level, while staying within the cost parameters and time constraints we had set out. To make certain we kept the situation under tight control, we chose to allocate construction work to First Nations groups upfront, to test the waters, so to speak. That would allow us to see how capable their teams were, and if we saw a problem there was still time to rectify it. As it turned out, we didn’t need to worry.

The First Nations construction crews were first-rate. We began by having them do some earth-moving work on the Nordic cross-country ski trails in the Callaghan Valley. They finished below budget and before their deadlines. They were good. And they were excited to be in on the serious action of building the Games. Everyone was so pleased with the quality of the work that we ended up awarding them about $50 million in contracts, a far leap from the $15 million that was first envisioned. Fact is, they gave us an early edge by saving us money and getting us ahead of schedule. The result was outstanding construction, beautiful venues, full First Nations participation, additional jobs and job training. It also gave these companies a new confidence and new capacity to compete for high-level construction work in the future and worked wonders for our relationship with the four host First Nations.

I was told a great story about a Native father and his son who were part of one of the construction teams in the Callaghan Valley. At one point, the father noticed the son taking a break, sitting on a rock admiring the scenery. He got off his machine, walked over and told him to get back to work. They were there in the service of their country, he told his boy, and there was no time to waste. Such was the spirit of the men and women who came to work on the project from First Nations communities in the Sea to Sky corridor from North Vancouver to Whistler.

AT VANOC, WE
worked extremely hard to ensure that the culture at all these projects was healthy and that there was a keen focus and desire to complete the facilities on time and on budget. We needed to make all construction workers feel as much a part of our Olympic family as the person working on logo designs or the one putting together our ticketing program. We were all striving for the same thing and needed to be guided by the same principles.

To make sure that the workers felt included, I would visit construction sites often, and if not me then another member of the executive. We instituted a program in which the workers were given Olympic jackets by one minister or another and were awarded beautiful medals by the premier, who thanked them personally for their work. It was a small thing to remind the workers, who had come from across Canada, of the key role they were playing in helping to prepare the region and the country for the extraordinary experience we were about to have.

By the end of 2006, most of the concerns about construction costs had waned. At least the public debate had quieted down. We were ahead of schedule on many venues. Finding enough accommodation in Whistler still presented challenges, but overall we were being given high marks by the
IOC
for stability. We felt we had weathered the first early storms that every organizing committee faces and had come out even stronger as an organization. We were finding a second wind. I could feel morale improving.

Our first venue was completed in early 2007—that was the freestyle skiing and snowboarding stadium at Cypress Mountain. By the end of the year, all of the venues at Whistler would be finished—including the ski jumping facilities, the Sliding Centre and the cross-country ski course in the Callaghan Valley. The last venue to be completed was the new curling rink in Vancouver, which opened in 2009, a year before the Games began but just when we needed it.

THE BIGGEST CONTROVERSY
surrounded the construction of the Athletes’ Village in Vancouver. We had entered into an agreement with the city early on to provide $30 million toward construction— any costs beyond that were the city’s responsibility. The plan was to build the village on an iconic site on the south shore of False Creek, just across from where Expo 86 was staged—by any measure it was a jewel of a location. Under the plan envisioned by the city, the condominium units would be used by the athletes during the Games and then sold at market prices afterward. The plan called for more than 200 units to be set aside for social housing.

Millennium Development Inc. won the right to build the village complex and they soon produced plans for a state-of-the-art community built to the highest environmental standards in the world. The cost was about $1 billion. Rumours aside, everything seemed to be going fine with construction until fall 2008 and the beginning of the worldwide financial panic. Millennium had arranged financing with a New York–based hedge fund company called the Fortress Investment Group. Fortress, also the parent company of Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort, was really feeling the pinch and was increasingly concerned about overruns that Millennium was incurring at the Athletes’ Village. That fall, it stopped making its monthly loans to Millennium, which forced the City of Vancouver to step in and provide a financial lifeline to the developer. It really had no choice since our deal to provide the village was with the city, not Millennium.

But the decision to provide the financing was made on camera and leaked to Gary Mason. Mason’s stories in the
Globe and Mail
were published on the eve of a civic election. The governing Non-Partisan Association (NPA) bore the brunt of the scandal that erupted around the secret loan, and the party was all but wiped out at the polls. The election ushered in Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver party, which took swift political advantage of the situation. Behind the scenes, bureaucrats would lose their jobs, including City Manager Judy Rogers, who sat on our board and had been a champion for the Games from day one. It was a shame to lose Judy because she was smart, savvy and had done a great job for us. Penny Ballem, a formidable administrator, succeeded her.

Eventually, the city would completely take over financing for the project. It wasn’t ideal from the city’s perspective, but there were few other options. The complex would eventually get finished on time and would become easily the best Athletes’ Village in the history of the Olympics. It would be a marquee project for a twenty-first-century global city.

Although we weren’t directly involved in the problems the Athletes’ Village experienced, we couldn’t help but get a little wet when the story splashed over the front pages of the papers for months on end. The new mayor didn’t help by trying to play politics with the situation he inherited, making the NPA look as bad as possible in the process. He suggested that taxpayers had been left with a $1-billion nightmare. I thought it was a lot of overhyped rhetoric that wasn’t particularly helpful or especially fair. In fact, it would come back to haunt him a bit. By the fall of 2010, the Athletes’ Village was back in the news for all the wrong reasons. A suddenly soft real estate market had stalled sales, which whipped up more doom-and-gloom stories about how much money the city was going to lose over the project. The mayor’s handling of the issue was coming under constant attack.