No real surprises during my time at the Executive Committee public deputations on the casino issue yesterday except for the weird, continued contortions going on at the mayor’s office.
The city needs the revenue, the administration claims, whatever that revenue may be, despite previous assurances that Toronto didn’t have a revenue problem. A casino will bring [make up your number here] of jobs to Toronto, well paying, union jobs, the mayor declares, a concern which has never seemed to be much on his radar until now. And then there’s downtown versus Woodbine, the haves versus the have-nots. It was all about looking out for the little guy, remember? Now it’s the big boy developers and out-of-town movers-and-shakers.
Mayor Ford 2014 is essentially campaigning against Mayor Ford 2010. (h/t @paisleyrae)
I’m not sure many minds were changed with Monday’s deputations. That’s probably not the reason for them anyway. If anything, opinions were just further entrenched.
The real politicking starts today, as the debate goes into the Executive Committee. It’s not at all clear Mayor Ford has the votes to even get the motion out onto the council agenda. But I imagine members of the Executive Committee won’t want to be solely responsible for killing a casino, if that’s the way it goes. They’ll put that decision fully on city council’s plate.
So the saga continues, staggering dubiously toward a quiet finale. Until at least the next campaign season.
— submitted by Cityslikr
“…with the usual complement of pious ideologues and judgmental drips…”
I liked that line from Rosie DiManno’s column today. She’s right, the noise would deafen you and make you miss many important points. I agree with her too, many TO residents resent being told what’s best for them, especially by those clowns under the Circus dome.
A governing body’s role is to protect or help its citizens and to demonstrate good governance. Increasing gambling revenues by making it more accessible for those who can least afford it, and to allow the City and Province to avoid making the tough budget decisions to cut services or raise taxes, is both short-sighted and politically selfish.
Lottery tickets/gaming returns provide the Province with huge chunks of dollars in funds from gamblers. For the City to host a casino, we will be helping the Province expand a regressive tax where the vast majority of funds will come disproportionately from lower-middle to lower income earners. These funds represent the accumulated losses on bets, money that is taken out of the economy and savings of earners in order to pay for services from the Province.
How is this fair? Expanding gaming in the GTA does not represent good public policy over the long-term.
Being for and against the best interests of Unions exposes more than just a selected few in the Circus who speak with forked-tongues.
The Exec. vote was 9 to 4! Since there are 15 progressives, 8 mush & now 4 Fordites. The NO will be at least 27 at Council this spring
P.S. Isn’t gaming a tax on gamblers?
Gambling is a tax on the stupid. So is the tax on cigarettes and other vices.
If you lose, I guess it is a 100% tax given the odds are in favour of the house. There are still some 15-20% of people who smoke. Could be the stress of work that SOME people drink and drug like Ford…
But people choose to go and gamble, people choose to drink and do other vices. If we don’t want a casino, we should also ban booze and cigarettes, etc, etc
We’ll simply let our councillors know to vote against the casino in downtown & Etobicoke…
And vote against cigarettes and booze and junk food while they are at it.