Betting against a casino in Toronto

Posted Jan 26, 2012 By Charles Gordon

All of us who live in and around Ottawa have only the fondest feelings for Toronto and want it to prosper and be recognized internationally for the exceptional city that it is. It is much easier for us to have these fond feelings after our hockey team has defeated theirs.

Right now, Toronto has another opportunity to stand out and be recognized as distinctive and wonderful. It can do this by refusing to build a casino.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation is reported to be about to recommend a casino for Toronto, perhaps at Ontario Place. The mayor is said to be favourably disposed to the idea. Some city councillors are positively drooling. A bit of opposition to the idea has been voiced, notably by the Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, but it based mostly inefficiencies in the lottery corporation and the new casino's impact on casinos in smaller Ontario communities, such as Niagara Falls and Windsor. You don't see too many people objecting to the principle of the thing.

Perhaps we've been living with casinos for too long. People can get used to anything after awhile, even a bad smell. You can see where Toronto would be sorely tempted to go for the casino. Casinos are reputed to attract tourists, even though they don't always do so. In border towns, with a weak Canadian dollar, they worked OK. Not so much now.

Perhaps a more important appeal of the casino has to do with the city's reputation. Toronto has always wanted to be considered world class and people with not quite as much imagination as they should have think that the way to be world class is to have what every other city in the world does.

When, in fact, it's the opposite.

The urgency of not building a casino is underscored by the fact that casinos are not very helpful institutions. They take money out of the hands of people who should really be doing something else with it. They contribute to the growth of gambling addiction, a serious problem in our society. Among those most affected by gambling addiction are governments, who have come to depend on the revenue generated by casinos as a sneaky form of taxation.

Rather than an honest tax, openly levied on the basis of people's ability to pay or their retail purchases, it is a disguised tax, based on people's desperation.

You would not know this from the way casinos are promoted - with pictures of elegant men in dinner jackets and women in evening dresses out for a sophisticated night on the town, sipping cocktails beside a roulette table and laughing. Those people, in the imagination of casino supporters, spend lots of money shopping and dining and staying over and helping to stimulate the local economy. In reality, the men and women are wearing parkas and glumly feeding loonies into machines until they get back on the bus and go home, contributing nothing to the local economy except perhaps for those engaged in addiction control.

Toronto could look at Thunder Bay, which put a casino into its downtown in the hopes of saving it, which it didn't. Toronto could look at Hull, now Gatineau, where the casino sucked the life out of the downtown at night.

Toronto doesn't need a casino to attract tourists or entertain its own people. It has professional baseball and hockey and basketball and theatre and museums and nifty neighborhoods. Some day it may even have a decent harbourfront (not that we in Ottawa should talk).

Therefore, if Toronto is wise, it could brag: "Look, our city is so world class that we don't even need a casino!"

With any luck, other cities all over the globe would begin demolishing theirs, to be like Toronto. What a world-class world that would be.