If Ontario Is Encouraging More Gambling, Why Pick On The Girls?

A  Brief Commentary by Doug Draper

“I don’t understand why prostitution is illegal,” said the late American humourist George Carlin a few years back. “Selling is legal. Fxxxing is legal. So why isn’t it legal to sell fxxxing?”

Hey, Mr. Premier, there is more money for you, right out there walking the streets.

 Sorry if you found the barely disguised use of the F-word offensive here, but let’s not lose the point of George’s question. Why isn’t prostitution legal, especially in Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario?

I mean here we are talking about a government that is all-out in favour of casinos and online gambling, and of finding ways to encourage more people to gamble so it can rake in those ‘sin taxes’ for what? To improve our health care and education systems?

That’s what McGuinty’s finance minister Dwight Duncan and his gambling chief, Paul Godrey, the head honcho of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG), said. They need more people gambling, including more of our young people, to get the money we need to help pay for education and health care services.

In other words, regardless of what we think of gambling, the ends justify the means. Or as Robert Moses, the late all-powerful builder of roads and highways in New York State in the middle decades of the last century, once said; “If the end doesn’t justify the means, then what does.”

That brings me back to the ladies of the night, not that I have ever personally used their services or have any plans to in the next few minutes. But if McGuinty and company are going to go all gaga over raking in more gambling revenue, why not legalize prostitution and rake the returns in from that too?

 Hey Dalton, don’t get all upset about the recent Ontario Court of Appeal ruling legalizing brothels in Ontario. I read in The Globe and Mail and other newspapers in the province that your attorney-general John Gerretson is considering appealing this ruling on the grounds that “people feel safe in their communities.” Well, if you can do such a great job of making people feel safe in their communities with gambling, which was once in the monopoly of organized crime, why can’t you do it with prostitution.

As a recent letter writer to CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning Michael Enright wrote about governments like Ontario’s becoming so addicted to gambling revenue to keep the province’s books in order, why not “supplant” the other gold-digging businesses of organized crime and legalize prostitution, and perhaps even the narcotics racket too.?

After all, what is the difference Dalton? You have already lowered the bar with gambling. So let’s not pretend you are governing from some moral high ground here. We already know  that many of the gangster lot that ran gambling before the province took it over are overseeing prostitution now.

So let’s get past any high-and-mighty crap about prostitution. There are probably billions of more dollars that your government can rake in from prostitution, Mr. Premier, so why not just grab it.  Just chalk it in as another “sin tax,” right!

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