Casino runaround

Now that the Ontario government has told the city what it knew (or should have known) all along — that Ottawa will not get a second casino — we can end the pretence council has been engaged in for months now.

Finance Minister Charles Sousa sent a letter to Mayor Jim Watson Monday, saying he’d asked the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. to determine if two gaming sites in Ottawa were commercially viable, and the answer was No.

“Based on this analysis, the Ontario government continues to support the OLG recommendation of developing one zone and one site in the Ottawa area,” the minister wrote.

The OLG expressed this view months ago, and Premier Kathleen Wynne reiterated that point in Ottawa during the byelection campaign a few weeks ago, and every serious person in the city knew there wouldn’t be two casinos in Ottawa out of this process.

But having sole-sourced the gaming site to the RideauCarleton Raceway, Watson and his council pretended they still believed in a competitive bidding process they had long abandoned.

They had to do something to placate a furious Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk, who believed he had been had.

Throughout the process, councillors sought to make the province the straw man, but in truth, council dug itself a big hole and didn’t have the courage to own up to its mistakes.

If councillors believed the Raceway site to truly be in the city’s best interest, they should have stuck with that decision, and defended it as a matter of principle.

Instead, they opted for an unedifying charade, and one can only hope that they’ve learned their lesson.