Last month I weighed in with my distrust and disdain of a proposed mega-expansion of the Edgewater Casino, which would embed two football fields of video lottery terminals (a.k.a. electronic slot machines) in the BC Place renovation.
Once it is in, we can look forward to taking our children and grandchildren to soccer games and bumping into drug dealers with hockey bags full of $20 bills as we walk to our seats.
Proponents, too, have been doing the rounds, trying to convince the business community that there are many jobs at stake, much revenue for the province and charities and crime problems at casinos are no different than a shopping mall.
Really?
Do Hell’s Angels try to infiltrate the management of shopping malls the way the RCMP tell us they do at casinos? Has anyone been murdered coming out of a shopping mall, as happened at a Paragon casino near Edmonton? Do drug dealers launder money at shopping malls, then walk away without anyone saying anything?
But back to the business case.
We hear a lot about the upside: the $450 million development with two hotels, restaurants, a theatre, 1,200 parking places and all those tax dollars. But no one is measuring the downside. We know that 35% of gambling proceeds come from problem gamblers who are, as former attorney general Geoff Plant said, “one of this industry’s absolutely necessary byproducts.”
Here are some questions that should be answered before any expansion is approved.
Who is putting up the financing for this project? BC Pavilion Corp. (PavCo) chairman David Podmore insists there’s no public money involved. But we know that 40% of private casinos’ capital costs are paid by the BC Lottery Corp. (BCLC), which doesn’t own any property itself. BCLC is on track to spend three quarters of a billion dollars on private casinos by 2015. Our money. On this casino? Who is financing Paragon?
Where will the proceeds go? What was once promised to the city from Edgewater wasn’t delivered. What was once promised to the arts groups who backed the first slots in Edgewater (a better bingo hall on the premises) was never delivered.
The province has no policy on splitting the take except that it’s leaving charities and arts groups behind. They get less money now than they did in 1995, even though provincial revenue from gambling is now bigger than revenue from corporate income taxes, topping $1 billion this year.
Who is behind Paragon? This is a company whose only U.S. property is the 15-slot Creek Bar and Grill in West Las Vegas and whose only other operations are a truck-stop casino in Whitecourt, Alberta, and the River Cree Casino in Enoch Alberta, a third the size of its Vancouver proposal. It’s a company that won the lease in a lightening-fast 11-week response to a request for proposals, with former BCLC chairman Richard Turner sitting as a Paragon director after having invested in Paragon’s Alberta properties while he was still head of BCLC.
Who will take over if this project fails? We discovered the hard way at the Athletes’ Village what can happen under rushed deadlines when a private developer with uncertain financing wins a lease based on inflated revenue projections on property owned by taxpayers – and then can’t make the payments. Could PavCo end up running a money-losing casino if Paragon fails to live up to its promises?
Where will the customers for this casino come from? By all accounts, the casino market in the Lower Mainland is already saturated, which is why the existing Edgewater Casino went bankrupt and Hastings Park Racetrack is faltering. Paragon CEO Scott Menke says the focus is on “destination tourism.”
Are international gamblers really going to fly here to gamble at slot machines at BC Place Stadium?
Most importantly: can our city not do better than this?