Leadership Quote by Rick Larsen

The Olympics sell themselves as a party, but this line is the RSVP card from the security state. Rick Larsen frames his role as managerial and protective, the kind of calm, technocratic voice voters are trained to trust when something big and international descends on a region. The phrase "ready to handle" is doing heavy lifting: it casts border crossings as infrastructure that can be tuned up like lanes on a highway, smoothing friction so the spectacle can run on time.

The tell is the paired language of "risks and benefits". That balance is meant to sound pragmatic, not ideological, but it quietly normalizes a trade-off: welcoming global visitors and commerce while expanding surveillance, staffing, and enforcement capacity. "Risks" is conveniently elastic - it can mean terrorism, smuggling, visa overstays, even generic disorder - and because it is undefined, it justifies almost any preparatory measure. "Benefits" is equally broad, gesturing at tourism dollars and cross-border goodwill without committing to who actually gets paid and who gets policed.

The context matters: Vancouver 2010 put the US-Canada border in the spotlight, especially in the post-9/11 era when "border readiness" had become a domestic political shorthand for competence. By tying border policy to an apolitical mega-event, Larsen seeks bipartisan cover for more robust border operations. The subtext is clear: the Games are a deadline, and deadlines are how governments turn temporary exceptions into lasting systems.