The Premier's Tacky Wager

Gambling brings out the worst in us. It makes us grasp, and it makes us lie. Sometimes we just make stuff up to suit the moment. Take Gordon Campbell for example. In the 1990s he bet that opposing expanded gambling would help the BC Liberals defeat the morally bankrupt NDP, who wanted to pad their coffers at the expense of the poor, the habitual, and the marshmallow-headed. Now he's betting the public will buy the line that moving Vancouver's Edgewater Casino across a street, tarting it up, and tripling its size is not expanded gambling. Perhaps he thinks that, in our post-Olympics euphoria, the overwhelming excitement of funding a $500 million new roof on BC Place through gambling revenue will cause us to overlook the stratospheric level of his hypocrisy.

One could argue that the hypocrisy of Minister of Tourism, Culture and the Arts Kevin Krueger is even worse. After all, it was Krueger who said in 1997 that "Women in British Columbia will die because of gambling expansion. . . Children may die because of gambling expansion, and their blood will be on the heads of the government that expanded gambling and of the MLAs who voted for it."

Now, in what could be construed as a bizarre reversal of that rhetorical excess, Gordon Campbell has explicitly tied gambling revenue to health-care funding. Is he saying that the government must expand gambling or sick people will die?

Two ways to play

At least Rich Coleman, the minister of housing and social development who last year conspired with his boss to breach the government's commitment to funnel gambling revenue to arts, sports and community groups, once had the courage to say something honest about gambling expansion. Coleman argued that B.C. must ensure the money people lose while gambling stays in B.C. and doesn't go to some faraway government, or Washington State native band, or shadowy internet gambling magnate based for reasons of beneficial taxation in the great business centre of Bermuda.

Those are the horns of the gambling dilemma: do we give away the astonishing sums of money wagered and lost to strangers in faraway places, or do we find tolerable ways to keep it at home, and maybe even bring some money here from elsewhere? Because anyone can take their vacation pay to Las Vegas. Any Vancouver halfwit can take the Canada Line to the River Rock in Richmond, or the Millennium Line to the Boulevard Casino in Burnaby. And any night janitor can sit down at a computer in their squalid basement suite, after the kids have gone to bed, and pretend they're one of the happy, shiny people at partypoker.com.

Gambling firewalls can be miles long, but they are all about two feet high. Which is why opponents of gambling expansion, the ones who want to build walls to prevent its growth in the heart of Vancouver, appear almost as silly as the proponents. Sure, they don't lie nearly as much -- and they deserve real credit for that -- but they still delude themselves.

The question we face is a simple one: how to manage gambling so that we minimize the damage and maximize the benefit? Like drugs or prostitution, gambling is something we'd be better off without, but it's not going away no matter what we do.

Emulate Monaco, siphon the rich

We can begin by asking what we want from gambling, which as we have it now in B.C. is largely a tax on the poor and the stupid. I say we want to encourage it among the reasonably well off -- with a special emphasis on real-estate speculators and penny-stock promoters. And we want to encourage it among tourists. Let's, as much as is possible, export our social problems to the families of cruise-obsessed, weak-willed, male-model dentists from suburban Milwaukee.

Will the plan that Gordon Campbell now advocates accomplish this? No, I'm afraid the target market of this new cash grab consists mainly of over-served BC Lions fans and Home Show looky-loos. This current proposal is relentlessly middle-brow, with plenty of room around the edges for the masochistic poor who are trying to overcome a decades-long 6/49 losing streak.

This brings us to another example of Gordon Campbell's hypocrisy. Today, he says, we should accept a huge new gambling facility in Vancouver because "we have a better quality of casino." Well, actually, no. At least not better than we might have had, as Campbell should well understand, because the casino proposal for downtown Vancouver that most resembles the current plan was championed back in 1994 by his pal, the late Jack Poole, when he was chairman of VLC Properties Inc.

What we could have had

You may have some vague memory of the plan: a convention centre, cruise-ship terminal, luxury hotel and (often overlooked) permanent stage for Cirque du Soleil. The proceeds would have helped to fund both the tourism infrastructure and the Woodward's redevelopment. The plan died, however, at the hands of NDP ambivalence, BC Liberal fear-mongering, staunch bipartisan opposition at Vancouver city council, and two-to-one public opposition to expanded gambling.

It didn't help much that the project was personified by Bellagio creator Steve Wynn, who was set to execute the concept and run the hotel, theatre, and gambling tables. The Las Vegas showman made an easy target, and not without reason. Just as Donald Trump exemplifies wretched excess in New York, Wynn exemplifies it in Las Vegas. As a recent and unexpected visit to his Wynn hotel in Las Vegas taught me, he can pull money out of your nose when you're not even looking.

But here's the rub. Wynn builds casinos for rich people. This is no unimportant detail, because gambling is a highly socially stratified activity. The working-class gamble at the Golden Nugget on Freemont Street, and casinos like Circus Circus at the north end of the strip. Middle-class boomers go to the Hard Rock and New York, New York. Rich people (and those with the pretension to taste their extravagant trinkets) go to the Bellagio, the Wynn, and Caesar's Palace (where in 2007 Omaha businessman Terrence Watanabe lost an astonishing $127 million).

Downscale gambling

The Wynn/Poole casino would have sucked a lot of money out of cruise passengers and conventioneers, who are all here on their way to somewhere else. A permanent Cirque du Soleil stage would have been a huge boost to the local economy and to our city's creative life. And the atmosphere in a high-end gambling hall would likely have made the people of modest means most easily damaged by gambling excesses more than a little uncomfortable.

In B.C., however, we've opposed such showpiece casinos while we target the poor and those within easy shooting distance of poor. We squeeze Lotto Max and SportsAction so hard we could get blood from a stone, and we build all our casinos at the low end of middle-brow. The casino complex now proposed next to BC Place is no different, no matter how much lipstick is applied. It would be by middle-brow developer Concert Properties, and operated by the Vegas-based Paragon Gaming, whose local Edgewater Casino is distinguished mainly by its Holiday Inn appointments and mediocre food, and whose other casinos are based in Whitecourt and Enoch, Alberta.

We're told that this new downtown casino would rival Richmond's River Rock, an architectural catastrophe that at least provides a refuge for Beach Boys acolytes with disturbing facial hair. I have a friend who was a River Rock insider during its sausage-like creation. What does he say about the prospect of Vancouver proper snagging an institution of such stature? "Oh boy."

Tackiest place in the world

Many observers seem to think the current proposal is fait accompli. Public opposition to gambling appears to have softened. And because the proposed site is provincial land, the project Vancouver's Vision city council is ill-positioned to oppose it. Some of its members are already gambling-tolerant. In fact, their support for the introduction of slots to Hastings Park, back when Vision councillors cohabited with anti-gambling hardliners in COPE, contributed to their split with that party.

What's more, Gordon Campbell certainly knows how to jam things, and Mayor Gregor Robertson doesn't appear to have much of an appetite for brinksmanship with the province. Chief Vancouver planner Brent Toderian is already dissecting the finer points of building design. And the board of union-owned Concert Properties, formerly Jack Poole's VLC Properties, is dominated by union reps that allow it to work both sides of the political divide, which on the gambling issue is hard to read in any event.

I know where I'd put my money down on this one. Vancouver is going to limp, brimming with denial and self-loathing, into a future defined by middle-brow mediocrity. We could have emulated Monaco, and instead we're emulating Reno. Goodbye, Steve Wynn. Farewell, Cirque du Soleil. Hello semi-outdoor rooftop theatre featuring the ghosts of Gerry and the Pacemakers.