With Glowing Hearts, they'll take out the trash

In the news business, we call Friday "Take Out the Trash Day".

Governments have a nasty habit of releasing information that's destined to be unpopular or controversial on a Friday.

Government propaganda departments think that a Friday news release or news conference means unflattering information has little time to be digested and debated before the diversion of the weekend when news demand goes down.

Dubious and dastardly? Absolutely.

It's a common tactic that was explored by National Public Radio in 2005. It's employed by the British Columbia government under Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell.

B.C. Place Stadium's $365 million renovations were announced Jan. 9, 2009 in a news release. That was a Friday. So was Oct. 23, 2009 when the price was hiked to $458 million.

March 26, 2010 was when the government announced the province's biggest casino would be built west of B.C. Place Stadium. If you guessed that was a Friday, then jackpot!

Premier Gordon Campbell and finance minister Colin Hansen announced the Harmonized Sales Tax on Friday, July 23, 2009. The public uproar over the lack of public consultation was slow to begin, but did it ever snowball!

In Ottawa on Friday, Nov. 5, 2010, the federal Conservative minority government unleashed hundreds of documents showing the $860 million cost of the G8 and G20 summits in Ontario.

The latest to employ the "Take Out the Trash" strategy is VANOC.

The Vancouver Olympic committee held a post-board meeting media teleconference Nov. 17, 2010 (which was a Wednesday). Chairman Rusty Goepel, CEO John Furlong and CFO John McLaughlin (see above photo) refused to answer any substantial questions about dollars or numbers. That's because they delayed the release of the post-Games financial report yet again. Remember, this is an agent of the government whose fiscal year ended July 31.

So mark Dec. 17 on your calendar. Guess which day of the week that is?

Yep, it's a Friday.

VANOC was battered by a recession after pretending a recession of any magnitude would not happen. Now it's going way beyond overtime to clean up the books and trying to claim that they're just double-checking numbers and letting auditors audit. Truth be told, it's a bigger job than they anticipated and the costs much greater. By comparison, Salt Lake 2002 issued a financial report in June 2002.

Not only is Dec. 17 a Friday, but it's the last important business Friday of 2010.

They could have decided to "Take Out the Trash" on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve, but that would have entailed one of the few remaining VANOC staffers to actual work.

IOC liberates VANOC ticket numbers from virtual wait room

We know that Simon Ammann of Switzerland won the first gold medal of the Games Feb. 13 in ski jumping on the normal hill with a top distance of 108 metres.

We know that Canada's Sidney Crosby scored the winning 3-2 goal 7:40 into sudden-death overtime to beat the United States, end the Olympic competition and give the host nation a record 14th gold medal on Feb. 28.

We know the United States had the most medals overall with 37. We know Norwegian cross-country skier Marit Bjorgen's three gold, one silver and one bronze was the biggest individual medal haul of Vancouver 2010.

Now we're beginning to know more about the financial state of VANOC, the Games organizing committee which incorrectly assumed in its own business plan that a recession would not happen through the Games.

Until now, VANOC has kept secret how many tickets were sold and for how much. For those of us seeking that information, it's been like an extended stay in the dreaded VANOC/Tickets.com virtual waiting room.

The International Olympic Committee's Vancouver 2010 marketing report was quietly published July 6 and it revealed 1.49 million of 1.54 million available tickets were sold for a total $257 million. That's about $3.4 million shy of the VANOC forecast, but not including tickets for the Paralympics or Cultural Olympiad.

Even on the last day of the Games, VANOC claimed "1.6 million tickets available for the 2010 Winter Games."

VANOC chief financial officer John McLaughlin denied he knew ticket sales information when he was interviewed July 9 (about the British Columbia government's $50 million direct bailout), but he reluctantly agreed July 20 that the IOC numbers are accurate.

VANOC is operating under what amounts to a financial information blackout. Its last financial report release was Dec. 21, 2009 and it decided -- without telling the media -- that it would not release another until late fall 2010 after the audit of its results for the year ending July 31, 2010.

Because of that, VANOC is violating the agreement that defined the responsibilities of the organizing committee and funding governments before the bid was won. The 2002 Multiparty Agreement's sections 4.4 and 26 said the organizing committee would issue reports after each quarter. No exceptions.

Interesting that the pact was made in 2002. That was also the year of the Salt Lake Games. In June 2002 -- just three months after the Olympic flame was extinguished in Utah -- the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's financial information was published in the IOC's own Marketing Matters newsletter.

SLOC earned US$183 million when it sold 1,525,118 of the 1,605,524 tickets available to the Games.

Where Vancouver beat Salt Lake clearly was in the category of potential TV audience. In 2002 it was 2.1 billion. Even Turin 2006 estimated 3.1 billion people had access to television coverage of the Games. By 2010, it ballooned to 3.8 billion. During the Games, IOC marketing director Timo Lumme said: "From a global perspective we would expect that around 3.5 billion people -- over half the population of the world -- will have watched some coverage of the Games."

That 3.5 billion figure has since been constantly quoted by Premier Gordon Campbell -- the one with the red mittens. The Vancouver 2010 Marketing Report discloses a more modest 1.8 billion actual viewership.

The key word is actual.

By comparison, the Beijing 2008 Summer Games had a potential reach of 4.3 billion with an actual audience estimated at 3.5 billion, according to IOC spokesman Benjamin Seeley.

"The measurement (estimation) of actual audience reach has been adopted since Beijing 2008, while previously it was measured (estimated) as Cumulative Global Audience (in billions) and cumulative global viewing hours (in billions)," Seeley said. "The reason being we think it is a more realistic and informative approach to measure actual audience with average minute rating (AMR).

"These figures are TV only, as currently we aren't able to measure Internet and television separately on a global basis."