You have to hand it to Loto-Quebec. Few corporations - and certainly no state-owned ones - play their cards more skillfully than Quebec's gambling monopoly. When it comes to selling projects and picking partners, you can bet on Loto-Quebec to stack the deck.
The corporation's $1-billion proposal to move the Casino de Montreal from Ile Notre Dame to the Peel Pier in the south end of the city, for example, is dazzlingly seductive. What the corporation has planned for the grubby area around Bridge St. - best known to most Montrealers as the home of Costco and the former home of Canada Packers - is not so much a casino as a theme park, complete with a 300-room hotel, restaurants, a 2,500-seat theatre, a spa, a mall, gardens, a marina, a monorail and a "Quai d'Artistes."
At yesterday's unveiling, Loto president Alain Cousineau made the casino itself sound almost like an afterthought. The building, he insisted, would be relatively modest, and the gaming opportunities no greater than they are now on Ile Notre Dame. To sell this warm and fuzzy image, Loto has picked the perfect warm and fuzzy partner - the Cirque du Soleil. It's one thing to slam a company - even a state-owned company - that runs blackjack tables and a numbers racket for a living; it's quite another to attack the province's most beloved entertainment franchise (and Quebec's most popular export since the invention of maple syrup).
Who could doubt the sincerity of the Cirque's founder and president, Guy Laliberte, at yesterday's unveiling? The project, he said, would be an incubator of Quebec talent and creativity, revitalizing a shabby corner of Point St. Charles and drawing thousands of visitors to Montreal to spend their money. The Cirque, he insisted, would not lend its name to a project that did not reflect its values.
Fine - but what Montrealers have to remember is that at the heart of this little entertainment fantasy will be banks and banks of glittering, clattering machines designed to extract millions of loonies and toonies from the pockets of rich and poor alike. Government-run gambling is a $13-billion industry in Canada, an industry that relies on the innumeracy of the gullible.
Cousineau says he hopes the new casino will attract more out-of-province visitors to the roulette tables and slot machines, but that's hardly reassuring. Gambling opportunities have proliferated across the continent in the last decade, and yet the real high-rollers still go to Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
The current casino attracts 18,000 gamblers a day, but only 11 per cent of them are visitors. The rest are overtaxed Quebecers who, for reasons best-known only to themselves, choose to spend their free time throwing money at the government.
Both the province and the city still have to rule on this project, a process that will last well into 2007. But their answer to Loto-Quebec and the Cirque du Soleil should be clear: "No dice." Quebecers, on average, lose $462 a year each on everything from roulette to lottery tickets. That's a pittance compared with the $886 oil-rich Albertans gamble away, but it's still way too much.