McGuinty’s Revenue Grab Includes Sucking More Young Adults In To Gambling

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Now there is a great idea for addressing Ontario’s economic woes. Get more young people gambling.

Preying on the young. How much more desperate is Ontario going to get for gambling revenue?

 Let’s take a whole generation of young adults, many of whom are graduating from college and university these days with huge debts to pay off, if they can find a decent job to pay them off with,  and get them more engaged in buying lottery tickets and wandering into casinos to play the slots and crap tables.

That was one of the barely disguised messages that came out of the report and recommendations Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation chairman Paul Godfrey, joined by the province’s Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, introduced this past Monday, March 12 for “modernizing” the gaming racket in Ontario. The report identified as one of a number of weak points in Ontario’s grip on “gaming customers” the fact that young people in their 20s and 30s make up the smallest percentage of casino visitors and lottery ticket purchases. All the more reason to make the province’s gambling opportunities available online and at grocery store and other retail checkouts, and to develop other strategies for luring in more young players.

 “Mr. McGuinty, a man who launched his career at Queen’s Park with a private members’ bill to raise the age at which cigarettes can be purchased, might once have been pleased to learn that few Ontarians under 45 are spending on gaming,” wrote Globe and Mail columnist Adam Radwanski in a March 13 column. “But that’s no longer a luxury he has – not when the additional $1.3 billion in annual revenues OLG has promised is desperately needed to keep core services operational.”

With that kind of revenue to be picked from the pockets of younger generations, why not go further and create a culture of gambling in our schools? Perhaps the province’s Ministry of Education can find ways of work gambling activities into math lessons since there is a good deal of counting involved. Why not allow students to openly bet on high school football and basketball games? Hell, some of them are probably doing it out in the school yard anyway. They probably learned it from their parents.

Another thing the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation could do is lift its ban on allowing individuals under the age of 19 from entering a casino. That way mom and dad can bring them in to watch which could serve the dual purpose of allowing a bit of role modeling to set in and sparing the kids the possibility of being left suffer from heat prostration in a locked car.

If all of this sounds a bit ridiculous just think about how far we gone down the road already in this province with what was once an enterprise almost entirely run by organized crime. One government after another – NDP, Conservative and now Liberal – has become ever more hooked on what they once so righteously condemned as a destructive, immoral “vice” as a source of revenue for education, health care, charities and other services.

None of these parties appear ready to gamble their political necks with a plan to raise taxes fairly and based on income earners’ ability to pay to cover the cost of services. So let’s just keep encouraging more people to have their pockets picked chasing an elusive jackpot.

What a sorry state of affairs we have created for ourselves in this province.

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