No Cure For Ontario’s Gambling Addiction

 A Commentary by Doug Draper

 Like a drug user hooked on heroin or crack, the Province of Ontario seems hopelessly addicted to gambling.

 Call it “gaming” or call it a tax on suckers and lower income people, successive provincial governments – Conservatives, Liberals and NDP – going back to the 1970s have become ever more dependent on gambling as a source of revenue.  And with the current Liberal government facing a projected $16 billion deficit, the dependence on any and all loot that can be drawn in from lottery tickets, slot machines, crap tables and the like  has become desperate.

 That desperation is now surfacing again in a debate over whether the City of Toronto should finally get a gambling casino that some, including Jim Diodati, the Mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario, fear could cut further into the number of people who come to the two casinos in his city, especially when many of those people come from Toronto.

I’m not pointing a critical finger at Diodati here for standing up for the two casinos in his city. Those casinos aren’t going away and they have become a significant part of the city’s tourist economy. Yet they have also lost business in recent years to a casino right across the border in Niagara Falls, N.Y., tighter border-crossing rules and a stronger Canadian dollar.

 What I find interesting and sad is how eager the provincial government is to establish a casino in Toronto, even if it gambles on the future of the casinos here in Niagara. “We have to maximize profits, and we haven’t necessarily been doing that,” the province’s finance minister, Dwight Duncan, was quoted saying in The Globe and Mail this January 17.

 In other words, the provincial government needs even more revenue than the $1.9 billion it is already taking in annually from gambling to run its affairs and pay down that debt. So open a casino in Toronto and move forward with previously announced plans to offer online gambling this year – a racket that is expected to rake in another $400 million while making gambling even more accessible to anyone who has a computer hooked up to the internet at home.

 Ontario has certainly come a long way since the 1970s when hands were wringing over whether the government should even get in the business of selling lottery tickets. In 1975, the first year the tickets went on sale, the government took in $6 million and the revenues have been growing by leaps and bounds ever since.

 I’ve got a convenience store down the street that functions more like a gambling house on Fridays. You can go there on a Friday morning to buy a newspaper and a pack of gum and stand behind three people who are each buying $30 or $40 worth of lottery tickets in the hope that maybe, this time, their ship will come in. At least one of these people always look to me that they can hardly afford to be playing these games and are likely spending their food money.

 You can go online and find reports by agencies that deal with gambling addicts in Ontario and find out about the homes that have been lost, the marriages and families that have been damaged or destroyed, and the suicides. Yet as long as long as the money keeps pouring into the government’s coffers, the dice will keep rolling and the roulette wheels will keep turning. And hey, don’t disturb that guy wearing the adult diaper because he doesn’t want to lose his seat to someone else at his “lucky” slot machine.

 When gambling was run by the mob it was considered a crime and a vice. When the government runs it, it is called gaming and we can’t have enough of it.

 I have come to accept the probability that like taxes, government-run gambling is here to stay. Yet at the same time, what a sad way to run a province.

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