COMMENT
Suppose that the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. did not have a monopoly on gambling-related products in the province but on, say, bookshops. Or — getting crazy here — alcohol.
Now suppose that 15 years ago, an NDP government approved the concept of big bookstores or boozecans or whatever only in towns close to the border, where they would lure Americans enticed by a weak loonie to cross the porous border. It worked for a while, but then travel restrictions and a strengthened dollar cut the business by more than three-quarters.
It would seem ridiculous, in that scenario, to propose that the status quo is ideal. If the Ontario Bookseller and Magazine Corp. put forth a new business plan that called for selling its wares not just in places that used to attract tourists by the boatload, but closer to the major urban centres where the majority of customers live, it’s hard to imagine anyone saying this was not a sensible idea. And yet, as it pertains to opposition to the OLG’s proposal to put a casino somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area, subject to the whims of local politicians, that’s about where we are.
OLG president and chief executive Rod Phillips explained the lottery corp’s case in a speech to the Economic Club of Canada yesterday, reciting the same basic points that were made a year ago when it unveiled its modernization plan. The OLG delivers about $2-billion a year to the province, making it the largest source of non-tax revenue for Ontario. But the gaming industry has changed dramatically, making it much less effective at delivering results. Border casinos approved by the Rae government made $8-million a year just a decade ago, now that’s down to $1-million. It sees Toronto as the centerpiece of an expansion plan, where some kind of integrated resort-casino deal would add millions to the treasury of both the province and the host city.
This seems rather logical. Obvious, even. (And yes, the OLG chair, Paul Godfrey, heads the media company that owns the National Post. I’ve not discussed my opinions here with him, but if you like to imagine that all writers are doing the bidding of their corporate masters, then this is a good column for your clipboard.)
But opposition to the idea of a new casino, particularly one in downtown Toronto, appears staunch. It’s not surprising, and even understandable, that some of the concern comes from residents worried about the impact of a massive new facility on their neighbourhood. But those also seem like details that could be addressed further along in the process, which is still several steps away from the site selection phase.
The rest of the argument against the OLG plan falls into the no-casino-full-stop camp. Here, the belief from anti-casino councillors and residents is that a new facility should be opposed on moral grounds, and to a lesser extent on the economic case that costs related to increased problem gambling outweigh the material benefit of increased revenues. To hear some opponents discuss it, there is an airtight case that a new casino will lead to a spike in addiction, bankruptcies, divorces and various other social ills.
This struck me as the kind of thing that must be supported in the literature, since legalized gambling has exploded in the past two decades in many jurisdictions. But the research suggests the big picture is murkier. An oft-cited paper found an uptick in problem gambling in Niagara one year after its first casino opened in 1996, but local opinion was still supportive of it. (Whatever the negative impacts of the first casino, they weren’t enough to stop local authorities from approving the larger, second casino in the Falls that opened in 2004.)
Meanwhile, there are many studies that say the link between the arrival of a new casino and societal problems is less clear. A 2006 report prepared by the Scottish government said that video gaming machines found outside casinos, at pubs and the like, were “strongly associated” with problem gambling. “Casinos tend to require deliberate effort, in terms of planning and travelling to a venue, which discourages impulsive play,” it said.
A 2009 study in the Australian state of Victoria, which has a huge resort-casino in Melbourne, found that the rate of problem gambling was less than 1%, and consistent with the country as a whole.
And the U.S. Congress put together a national commission that studied the effects of legalized gambling, which offered the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion in 1999 that these things are hard to measure. “The Commission has concluded that it is currently impossible to obtain even a rough approximation of a true cost-benefit calculation concerning the economic impact of legalized gambling,” it said in its final report.
It’s a common refrain in the research: there is an association between the availability of gambling and people who develop problems, but we’re not sure how much of one.
But in Ontario, gambling is already widely available anyway. Unless the idea is to put that money-producing genie back in the bottle, then the argument is to let OLG keep doing what it’s doing, as long as it keeps doing it poorly.
That’s an odd way to handle a Crown asset.
National Post
