This fiasco has gone too far. Surely there are more important issues for Toronto Council and the Toronto newspapers to worry about. Constantly stirring the pot on a proposed casino is really counterproductive. It is a simple decision.
And any councillor that does not know the difference between guarantees and estimates needs to go back to grade school. If some councillor’s vote can be bought for an estimate of $100 million, why should he or she be reluctant to settle for a more realistic $50 million? It is not as though the money is going anywhere but into general revenues.
Would it really surprise the councillors and pundits to learn that Toronto will likely get more revenue from a casino than Ottawa? It is a simple difference in scale. Toronto serves a market area of over six million people. Ottawa is less than a third of that. Toronto also has some demographic differences and it does not have a pretty little casino already drawing from the market just across a bridge in Gatineau, Quebec.
And the question of a casino has very little to do with mathematics. It has more to do with what the city wants to be when it grows up. Toronto is a city that attracts people from around the world. It is cosmopolitan. It is sophisticated. It has fabulous restaurants and is a centre for design and fashion. It has world-class theatres and entertainments and festivals. It has great hotels, draws huge conventions and tries to have good sports teams in its excellent sports facilities. A casino is just another brick in that yellow brick road.
In reality, the Greater Toronto Area could probably support three world-class casinos. Does the casino have to be part of a larger hotel-entertainment complex? That is a question that the marketing experts can argue. If you were building the casino in the middle of a desert, you would probably need other amenities to attract families. Why does a casino in Toronto need all that additional cost hung on it? Why not use the casino to attract business to the good hotels the city already has? And casinos can support the international cuisine of the city.
When Premier Wynne called Ontario Lottery and Gaming tsar Paul Godfrey into her office the other day, she hopefully told him to try to tone things down. Nobody needs all this foolishness over a casino. And after all, when you have a guard dog like Paul Godfrey to guard your casino profits, you have to let him do the barking.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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