Prime Time To Legalize Sports Betting As Ontario Revenue Source

Prime time to legalize sports betting as Ontario revenue source
March 13, 2008
Dave Perkins
Toronto Star

It's clear tourism in Ontario faces major challenges, one reason Greg Sorbara was tabbed to run another study to confirm what seems readily apparent. Both Sorbara and tourism minister Peter Fonseca this week made speeches about Ontario needing to offer something new and exciting to draw travellers.

So here's the answer: sports gambling done properly. Seriously.

Get the feds to change the criminal code as it relates to single-game betting and let it rip across the country. Build large, Las Vegas-style race and sports books, the way the biggest casinos on the LV Strip have them – and where the amount of money bet is beginning to rival that taken in at the tables.

If you could bet sports the way everyone wants to bet sports – one game at a time, rather than the silly three-team parlays required by Ontario, among other provinces – these joints would be jammed with people betting on hockey, baseball, basketball and football. Tourists would flock. You can't get a hotel room in Las Vegas on Super Bowl weekend or when NCAA March Madness is rolling. People love to bet and will travel to do it.

Set up gigantic sportsbooks. Put one at Woodbine, where they're still trying to get that $350 million fun-city project off the ground, and another at Exhibition Place. Put them in Windsor and Niagara Falls. On NFL weekends you wouldn't be able to move. While the bettors were here, they might like their hotel, or find a couple of good restaurants or a nice golf course.

This idea also would get sports gambling out of the corner stores, where it is being pitched to underage kids, and into a controlled environment. You don't see any kids in the sportsbooks in Vegas.

Legalizing this one more form of gambling also would provide the government with many billions in revenue, rather than let it all escape through the Internet to offshore joints in the Caribbean or, worse, to sites run out of that Mohawk reserve near Montreal. Already, billions of dollars in worldwide Internet gambling takes place there with zero return to our governments.

Meanwhile, stupid games like Ontario's Pro-Line, which pay out a tiny fraction of what they should, are fighting a losing battle to Internet sites. So are racetracks, which cannot compete with websites that have zero overhead.

Let the government legalize and regulate the gambling, as was done in the U.K. a few years ago, and watch the money roll in. Put that revenue into sports programs for amateurs and kids and put it into the professional events, the car races and such, if it's really necessary.

Gambling is both the largest industry in the world now and also the largest growth industry. It cannot be stopped, no matter what out-of-touch lawmakers think about banning Internet betting sites and credit card access and so on. Likewise, the moral horse long ago left the barn; our province shamelessly hucksters all forms of gambling as a source of revenue.

Absolutely, social costs are part of the cost of doing business, but here's news: Kids who get hooked on Internet poker and develop a problem (and plenty do) are going to be looking for treatment, some of them, and guess who's going to pay for that? The same province watching shrinking revenues from sports betting and racetracks because they don't have the smarts to compete on a world scale.

It's an easy call at this point. Open it up, run it correctly and take the percentage that now flies away on the Internet. You'll have tourists beating down the border trying to get in and play their favourite teams, too.