Daily BrewExecutive bonuses latest bucket of cold water dumped on Toronto’s Pan Am Games
It seems impossible to hold a large festival or event in this day and age without obligatory complaints about spending and accusations about impropriety popping up. We seem incapable of deciding to host a multi-national event, like the Olympics or Pan American Games, hiring smart people to organize it and then leaving it in their hands.
Inevitably, we seek out controversy. Inevitably, society balks at the price tag, sneers at the salaries, pokes holes in pretty much anything. Of course, those holes often need to be poked, and those sneers are often justified.
Take Toronto's 2015 Pan Am Games, which has been inundated by controversy lately over expense claims submitted by members of the organizing committee. More recently bonuses promised to some of those executives have rankled feathers.
Earlier this week, media outlets received copies of TO2015 organizing committee claims that saw such things as coffee and moving expenses charged to expense accounts. We were outraged.
Some of the nickel-and-dime claims behind the furor:
$45 for a Blackberry cover (Blackberry, really?)
$1.89 for a Starbucks coffee (that's not even a Venti)
$100 to purchase a training book on how to handle employees.
[ Related: What impact will Toronto Pan Am Games spending flap have? ]
The latest iteration of this controversy broke on Friday, when the Toronto Star reported that the Pan Am Games has $7 million earmarked in bonuses for executives who complete their contract and stay on budget.
CEO Ian Troop alone is in line to secure a $780,000 bonus, on top of his $390,000 annual salary. According to the Star, some 64 top executives have structured bonuses that pay them 100 per cent of their annual salary if they stay in their contract through the end of the Games, and another 100 per cent if they keep to their budgets.
The payout structure is said to be modelled on one used at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, but the concern is clear. Why are well-paid executives receiving big payouts for doing their jobs? The Pan Am Games has a budget of $1.4 billion, the majority of which ($500 million each) comes from the federal and provincial government. So this is our money being paid out.
Yet the bonus structure comes from years of experience. From Vancouver to Calgary’s Olympics to the 1986 Vancouver Expo, these events have all used similar payout structures. Why? Because organizing a massive multi-national event is not easy.
It takes talented, capable people to do the work well. Those people tend to be in high demand, and often received better offers from other companies over the years leading up to the event itself. If those people jump ship before the end of the Games, the whole organization is thrown into disarray.
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“Large-scale games from the Olympics to the Commonwealth and Pan Am Games put these plans in place because, in the past, some organizing committees had lost significant numbers of key employees in the final months of before the games,” Courtney Pratt, interim chair of the human resources committee for the Games board of directors, told the Star.
Hey, we wanted to host the Pan Am Games. Well, not me (and maybe not you), but enough of us that the government went out and fought to get it. And, if done right, the Games will stimulate the economy to the tune of $2 billion and could lead to Olympic hosting duties in the future.
If we are going to do it, you might as well pay the right people to do it well. And then don't blame them when they cash the cheque.
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