Ottawa’s Paul Anka said it best. You can understand the anguish of his famous song when you feel lonely. And, wow, can you ever feel lonely when you find you are allied with that rag-tag group of misfits on the Toronto Executive Committee. These people want a casino in Toronto for all the wrong reasons.
Toronto Council, according to most of its spokespeople, is motivated solely by greed. They want casino operators to guaranteed hosting fees of at least $100 million per year. No responsible developer can guarantee that from a casino. And woe-betide the casino operator who has to put paying his nut to the city ahead of building and maintaining a healthy base of happy customers.
This fiasco draws you to the conclusion that neither side of the casino issue knows what they are talking about. And that hardly stops them from telling you all about what they do not know.
And now we find that a staff report for city councillors recommends that they use the casino as a carrot for a developer who will include an over-sized convention complex with the casino. The report thinks that such a complex could attract some $392 million in direct spending in the city. What the report fails to tell the councillors is that a casino by itself, properly located and promoted, could keep as many as five per cent of visitors in the city for an extra day and probably generate three times as much direct spending.
The report does, grudgingly, suggest that council support the expansion of Woodbine Entertainment into a full-fledged casino operation. This should have happened years ago and it draws on an entirely different market than a downtown or Scarborough location would serve.
People in Toronto should remember that theirs is the fourth largest English speaking metropolitan area in North America and it attracts over 20 million visitors a year. Nobody cares if you like to gamble or not. Some people do. If we are going to continue to attract visitors to our city, we need to offer a wide range of attractions, activities, sports, theatre, dining, etc. Casinos are just part of the excitement and fun of a great city experience.
Casinos are not a cash cow for lazy city councillors who are bereft of good ideas as to how they can fund the infrastructure and services that make a great city work.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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