Ontario’s Godfathers For Gambling Should Get The Boot

A Commentary by Doug Draper

If I were ‘King of Ontario’, one the first things I would do is give the royal boot to the head of the province’s Lottery and Gaming Corporation, Paul Godfrey, and his partner in gambling, the “honourable” finance minister Dwight Duncan, and replace them with Paul Collard.

Fort Erie, Ontario town councillor Paul Collard has a better grip on what to do about gambling mess than province does.

Who is Paul Collard, you may ask?

Well, Paul Collard is a councillor for the Town of Fort Erie, Ontario and after spending a half hour or so with him on the phone, I’m convinced that he may know more about the ups and downs of gambling industry than both Godfrey and Duncan combined, and he most certainly has a better feel for what it can do to dash people’s hopes and dreams.

Collard does not work in the gambling industry himself, nor is he a gambler, but he has two sons in their 30s, Ryan and Randy, working full-time in the industry. They are among the more than 200 people who will be losing their jobs at the end of this April when the OLG and its provincial government masters shut the doors on the Slots facility that opened with such fanfare in Fort Erie a mere 13 years ago.

I was one of the reporters assigned to cover the grand opening of the Slots and I can still recall the provincial officials, including Tory MPP Tim Hudak whose riding then included his hometown of Fort Erie, talking about what a cash cow this was going to be for the town, which would receive more than a million bucks  from the bounty those shiny machines would siphon from the pockets of patrons forever dreaming of hitting the jackpot, for the neighbouring horse racing track, which would receive its own cut, and for the province, which would use it to cover the cost of services the general public no longer seemed to want to pay for through regular taxes.

 It all seemed like such a gravy train at a time when there were no gambling joints across the border in Western New York and the American dollar was work about 20 cents more than a Canadian loonie. Just open the door and let the money roll in.

That’s never good enough in business though, said Collard, who has experience holding executive positions in companies. “When you are the first one out of the block with a product, you have to keep in mind from the start that, sooner or later, you are going to have competition if the product is that good,” he said. “So by the time you are going to market, you have to be planning your next move.”

Niagara Falls Liberal MPP Kim Craitor discusses demise of Fort Erie Slots and province's decision to keep both casinos in the Honeymoom City afloat at recent media conference. Photo by Doug Draper

It doesn’t look like the province did much in the way of planning ahead, said Collard, and now here the province is, pulling the plug on what it had hyped up for so long as a gold mine that would keep on giving to it, to the town, and to all those working at the Slots and the race track, which could also go down after the slot machines are packed up and shipped away.

What the town and region ought to do now, whether or not there is any last minute , stay of execution for the Slots, is to get busy in the economic development department and encourage the birth and growth of new and different businesses for putting people to work, said Collard. “You can’t sit and wallow in this,” he insisted. Niagara never should have placed such a big bet on the gambling industry in the first place. “We need to move forward with more diversification,” he said. “We need a positive approach (that says) we are going to survive. We have to.”

That sounds a helluva lot more promising than what we got from Godfrey and Duncan last week. Our Godfathers for Gambling don’t seem to know when to fold it. Now they want to find a home for a new super casino somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area – an idea that (if it is realized) could be the last straw for at least one of the two casinos in Niagara Falls, Ontario which have already been struggling from a loss of business from across the border and are now counting on “customers” from the GTA for more than half of their revenue.

 Godfrey and Duncan are also hoping to encourage gambling, including among people in their 20s and 30s, by making it more available on line and at regular cash-out counters for grocery and other major retail outlets. Through these “strategies” and others for “modernizing Ontario’s gaming industry,” these two high rollers claim they can create nearly 4,000 new jobs in the province and rake in more than a billion bucks annually in additional revenue for schools and other services the government hasn’t got enough guts to pay for through a combination of making cuts in areas where spending is out of control and raising taxes based on income.

Just days after unveiling this grand dream for more gambling revenue in Ontario, The New York Times published a cover story in its Sunday, March 18 magazine called ‘Busted – Can the Model for Casino Gambling be Fixed?’ This article, researched by Times writer Michael Sokolove, features information our provincial gambling gurus and the rest of us, including the opposition Conservatives and NDP who seem just as addicted to gambling money as the governing Liberals, might find instructive.

Here are a few passages from the article which I would suggest are just as relevant to the Ontario situation (or to Buffalo, New York for that matter, where residents are fighting to keep a casino out of the downtown) as they are to states  on the U.S. side of the border.

The article notes that with “a desperate search for new revenue by state governments and the proliferation of new casinos across America … casino gambling has become a commodity, available within a day’s drive to the vast majority of U.S. residents. Some in the industry (now) talk of there being an oversupply, as if their product were lumber or soybeans.”

“Resistance to gambling,” adds the article, “has been overwhelmed by the need for new sources of public revenue in an era when it has become nearly impossible, at any level of government, to raise taxes or even to let temporary tax cuts expire. A kind of self-perpetuating momentum fuels gambling’s growth: the more states that legalize it, the more politicians in states that haven’t done so argue that if their citizens are going to throw money into slot machines, they might as well do it at home. ‘Those people lose that money anyway,’ Ed Rendell, the voluble former government of Pennsylvania, said in a tense appearance on ’60 Minutes’ last year. Teeth clenched, he continued, ‘You’re simpletons, you’re idiots if you don’t get that.”

Will Niagara Falls, Ontario casinos survive any casino the province builds in the Greater Toronto Area? Photo by Doug Draper.

For those worrying themselves over how many people from the Toronto area will continue frequenting casinos in Niagara Falls if the GTA gets a casino of its own, there is this short passage to keep in mind: “Man gamblers are ruled by what is known in the business as the law of gravity. They stop where the pull is the strongest, which is usually the nearest casino.”

Here is another line or two for those wondering if older casinos like those in Niagara Falls could be devoured by new ones in larger population centres like Toronto. “The big buzzword in the business right now is ‘cannibalization’. It refers, in this context, to casinos’ gobbling up another’s’ customers, which for some of them may be the only route to survival.”

I don’t recall hearing or reading any of this from our Godfathers for Gambling when they were treating us to their illusions for the future of the industry in Ontario. Maybe some of them should send them a copy of the New York Times article.

Like I said at the start, I would rather have Paul Collard addressing our gambling conundrums in this province rather than this pair, although he probably, quite understandably, wouldn’t want the job.

You can read the New York Times Magazine article by clicking on http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/mike-sokolove-foxwood-casinos.html?pagewanted=all .

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