Raise the Hammer

Casinos are normally located on the edge of a jurisdiction (i.e. Windsor, Detroit). The reason OLG located casinos here, rather than in Downtown Toronto, was that they were pursuing a classical casino strategy - locate the casino on the edge of your jurisdiction in order to attract money from foreign visitors, and minimize the impact on your own citizens in the process (no casinos close to major Ontario population centres).

Of course over time the US border cities built casinos that were just as attractive if not more attractive to US consumers (you can smoke in them I believe) and they don't have to face the hassle of crossing a border.

Revenues in Canadian casinos dropped.

But the OLG was addicted to these revenues, and so has launched their "let's build a casino everywhere" plan. They plan to build gaming facilities across the province, one per "region" to saturate the market and get every nickel and dime of gambling revenue they can witout having the casinos compete with one another directly.

There are many problems with this strategy, not the least of which is that each casino is really just drawing residents from that immediate gaming "zone" - residents further afield have their own local casino to go to. So revenue is necessarily capped and will be nowhere near what has been historically the case for isolated casinos.

In Hamilton, this additional issue of "where to put the casino" has the potential to create even greater damage (other cities face this same problem).

Ideally, the casino should be on the edge of our jurisdiction, and accessible to visitors from within our casino "zone", but not very accessible to citizens of Hamilton itself (to minimize social harm).

We should be placing it near Burlington, and/or Milton, somewhere with highway access...so we can attract money to the casino from out of towners, rather than fleecing our own citizens (same strategy ontario pursued, only on a smaller scale). Best of all, we won't be subjec to competition from an "immediate" neighbour, because gaming zones keep the facilities somewhat spread out.

Why would we not put a facility in the heart of hamilton? Well, while it's arguable (and by no means certain) that a downtown facility might make more money, that facility would be deriving most of its revenues from citizens of Hamilton, giving no real net "gain" to the local economy.

If anything, there is a net negative to a casino in downtown Hamilton because the revenue will come almost ENTIRELY from Hamiltonians, and yet the provincial portion will be distributed across the province, as the province sees fit.

A casino in the downtown is a bad deal for Hamilton.