Would someone please tell Toronto City Council to get on with it! The Toronto Star ran what must be story number 50 in the anti-casino debate last week. The embarrassment was that it was written by David Olive, one of the Star’s better writers. It just goes to prove that people will most often write what they are told to write to keep their job.
David Olive’s story was headlined Time to walk away from the casino debate. We only wish the Star would. This story was about the “astonishing” report released March 12 by the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) at the University of Toronto. (Why it took almost three weeks for the Toronto Star to discover this “astonishing” report was not explained.) In his typical colourful language, David tells us that the MPI report “knocks the stuffing out of the casino advocates’ bloated claims…”
The MPI report and David Olive and the Toronto Star seem to see the possibility of a casino in Toronto as being a “blizzard of numbers—all of them meaningless—and conveyed in a remarkably skewed and misleading manner.” And that certainly seems to be the Toronto Star’s style.
It is David Olive’s premise in the story that there is a limit to how much money the gambling industry can drain from bettors. He thinks we have reached it.
We all need to be reminded that it is not Ontario Lottery and Gaming that is promoting all the smoke and mirrors of large scale resort gambling complexes in Toronto. OLG has finally realized that it is not the organization to be running gaming in Ontario. It wants to turn the business end of things over to the private sector. If those private sector advocates want to make asses of themselves with stupid projections, that is their game. OLG is just being honest and open and offering an opportunity to the Greater Toronto Area.
It might have been fine to have casinos in the major border cities and up in Orillia at the beginning but the price of gas is hurting the casino business in Ontario. People in Toronto should not need to pay bus companies or gasoline retailers to have fun at a casino.
And the MPI people are probably right that Toronto hardly needs a casino to continue to grow, expand and be an economic success. If anything, a casino can be equated to Gay Pride Week, Caribana (or whatever we call it now) and closing down Yonge Street for a street party. These events and a casino are just part of the fabulous mix that says Toronto is a great city. It is saying “We are big kids now and we can play at adult games.”
And Toronto Star editors can stick their anti-casino bias in their ears!
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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