Between the lines of the death of the Toronto casino


 Posted on May 19th, 2013 –

Was the proposed casino supposed to bring revenue to the city of Toronto, or “10,000 jobs“, as Rob Ford repeatedly pronounced?

I suppose if the numbers were as high as Ford asserted ($100 million, minimum), a casino could’ve potentially brought both. But those idealized revenues turned out to be about half (or a quarter, or an eighth, depending on what day it was and how he was feeling), of Rob’s projections.

So faced with the reality of only about $54 million under the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission’s formula for divvying up casino spoils, Ford declared the project dead:

If the province won’t agree (to) that $100 million, then folks, the deal is dead. We are not going to carry on the casino debate.

Well, that’s it. Ford’s one and only source of potential income for Toronto projects has dried up (aside from the mysterious public-private partnerships that never materialized). So if the city can’t get a bigger chunk of cash out of the deal then it’s pointless.

Oh, and about those jobs — if the city can’t get a bigger chunk of cash out of the deal then they’re pointless too. Sorry, single moms, I guess it’s a future of frying up chicken for the foreseeable future.

Okay, snarkiness aside, I hope you see what I’m driving at here. Rob has no problem pulling the “jobs, jobs, jobs!” card out of his ass when it’s expedient for him, but when something like the casino fails we quickly see that it was never about jobs, his constituents, or the citizens of Toronto — it’s about gobbling up money for use by the government. Okay, yes, we do need transit funding, but we also need jobs, so to sacrifice one at the expense of another belies the true intentions behind the casino push.

Not that I believed the job numbers either, but that’s kind of beside the point.

At least there was a smidgen of honesty in some of Ford’s remarks:

Contrary to what many people have said, I’m not married to a casino, I never campaigned on a casino.

That’s true, unless you consider marriage to be an exclusive commitment. Then again, he never campaigned on subways either, but that never stopped him from claiming the opposite at every opportunity.

What's on your mind?