The Playbook Failed

Unspoken in the Playbook of Predatory Gambling is: RUSH!

It doesn't often fail.

What went wrong with the casino (a hypothesis)

June 5, 2013. 4:38 pm • Section: City Hall

 

In his two-plus years as mayor, Jim Watson has not botched a file as badly as he has the question of whether Ottawa should get a new casino. He may have done things some people don’t like, but he’s generally done them cleanly, keeping things moving through city council and avoiding ugly, pointless confrontations. That’s widely seen as part of the Watson brand: he’s a highly competent politician. He knows what he wants and he almost always gets it.

But the casino is different.

Watson has supported an expansion of gambling in Ottawa since long, long before it was was on anybody else’s agenda. Watson made a point of saying that in a scrum with reporters Tuesday, noting that he advocated for table games to augment the Rideau Carleton Raceway’s slot machines when he was an MPP and nobody would give him the time of day on that particular thing. And then he backed it as mayor, getting city council to ask the province to let the raceway add table games very early on, in a move that was ultimately overtaken by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp.’s expansion plans.

This suggests his belief that Ottawa would be better off with more, and more interesting, gambling is genuine. It’s not a pose, not a political favour for friends at Queen’s Park.

So when the OLG came along with its modernization project, Watson probably thought, “Hey, great.

Let’s get going.” But being a canny politician, he’d have known there’d be some pretty vocal opposition to the idea. Maybe not from a majority of residents, but from enough people to kick up an unpleasant fuss, frighten some politicians, and maybe put a new Ottawa casino at risk.

Let’s say you figure 25 per cent of the population is against expanding gambling, 25 per cent are actively for it, and half the people just don’t much care one way or the other. We have slot machines at the racetrack, where you can place bets, and nobody’s talking about shutting either of them down.

The casino in Gatineau is a major attraction and nobody really calls for it to be shut down, either. So if you want to expand gambling and you figure most people don’t care about it but a vocal minority will make things unpleasant, what do you do?

You try to get the expansion approved as fast as possible. Lingering on the question won’t change very much except give that vocal minority of opponents more time to make things ugly. So get on with it, get a vote passed, and drop it from the agenda till OLG presents a specific proposal to debate.

But then a couple of things went wrong.

First, opposition to a new casino is probably stronger than 25 per cent, and the rush to get a council vote out of the way activated a bunch of that opposition in a way that an even slightly slower process might not have.

Second, despite how quickly the City of Ottawa got the thing done, the OLG‘s process turned into a gong show. Toronto’s drawn-out debate kept the issue on the periphery of the news in Ottawa. Dalton McGuinty and Dwight Duncan resigned and were replaced by the much less gambling-friendly Kathleen Wynne and Charles Sousa, who are a lot less willing to bulldoze criticism and opposition.

The question of how much money the City of Toronto would get from a casino turned into a real debacle that culminated in the dismissal of OLG chairman Paul Godfrey (who’s CEO of Postmedia Network Inc., which owns the Citizen) and the mass resignation of the rest of the board.
So instead of a quick vote, a brief outcry and then silence for 18 months, we got a constant drumbeat of casino-related news that reminded everyone over and over and over again that Ottawa hurried to a vote in way other cities didn’t.

The first was a miscalculation. The second was a serious of unfortunate events that nobody could have foreseen. And here we are, with Watson fighting a rearguard action to preserve the Rideau Carleton Raceway and interest in a casino collapsing like a deflating balloon.


http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2013/06/05/what-went-wrong-with-the-casino-a-hypothesis/