Ottawa's casino plans in the wilderness
David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: August 12, 2014, Last Updated: August 12, 2014 12:49 PM EDT
Plans to expand gambling at the Rideau Carleton Raceway are still afoot, the provincial government’s gaming agency insists, though it’s been almost a year since anybody’s talked about it in public.
You remember city council’s whipsawing back and forth on whether it wanted two casinos, one casino or none, before finally settling on a small one at the rural raceway and insisting that was what everybody had supported all along until the perfidious Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. came along and confused them. That was last September.
Months before that, in March 2013, the OLG finished taking submissions from would-be operators of a casino in Ottawa, planning to make up a shortlist of companies that would bid. With city council’s stumblebumming around all that spring and summer, one can understand the agency’s pausing while Ottawa sorted itself out. But they’ve had a list to work from for 17 months and clear limits from council on what they can do here — a few card and roulette tables at the raceway, pretty much — for 11.
“You have to realize, this is the biggest transformation of a government agency in Ontario and it has evolved,” said OLG spokesman Tony Bitonti by email. “We are in the third year of a complex multi-year procurement process that involves dozens of communities across the province, not just Ottawa.”
Indeed it has evolved. Then-premier Dalton McGuinty and his finance minister, Dwight Duncan, were much keener on gambling as a provincial money-maker than Kathleen Wynne and her finance minister, Charles Sousa. An auditor’s report on the OLG’s plans last spring also found that, moral questions aside, the agency’s projections of the billions of dollars gambling could bring in for the government were very optimistic. An additional $1.8 billion over six years is realistic, the auditor found, rather than the $4.6 billion the agency had initially projected.
The OLG has also had to try to work horse racing back into its plans, reversing a strategy that would have moved its operations out of the tracks where its slot machines have been based for years and into sparkly new palaces closer to downtowns.
Ottawa’s early eagerness for a casino, in contrast to Toronto’s reluctance, had put it close to the top of the OLG’s priority list. It was part of the first pair of regions in which the agency wanted to shortlist bidders, along with what it calls an “East” region that includes Kawartha Lakes and Belleville. It’s now been overtaken: The first formal request for proposals (RFP) from a group of shortlisted bidders went out in April, covering the East region alone — even though one for Ottawa’s one location at a race track probably would have been simpler to put together.
Bitonti says we shouldn’t read too much into that. “Factors contributing to the order of RFP releases can include economic factors and contractual readiness of the current sites located within the gaming zone or gaming bundle,” he wrote. “OLG is preparing to issue more RFPs in the coming weeks and months. I don’t have a specific date for the Ottawa RFP.”
He doesn’t say it explicitly, but understandably a roulette wheel and some blackjack tables at the raceway don’t grab the agency’s attention the way a gambling-based entertainment centre in the Market, by the airport or at the Canadian Tire Centre had.
The OLG wanted not just to give people more chances to gamble, but to lead a cultural change in Ontario that would have made gambling a more routine sort of entertainment, so people would drop $50 at a casino as readily as they might buy two movie tickets and some popcorn for an evening out. Gambling had to be normal, something cool young people did.
That’s a much more ambitious project, extending far beyond the gambling industry, and we hadn’t talked about it before the OLG got started. When we got a chance, most of us said no. Adding some table games to the raceway on Albion Road certainly won’t achieve it, and that’s just fine as far as public opinion is concerned.
They’re still coming. Eventually. When the OLG gets to it.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
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