BUDGET BLUES
Ontario’s decision to scrap the Slots at Racetracks program is ‘mind-boggling’ and will have a disastrous effect, critics say
Horse-racing workers fear for industry after slots program cut,
CAMPBELLVILLE, ONT.— It’s qualifying morning at Mohawk Raceway, sun shining, the paddock a colourful, clattering carnival of perpetual equine motion, and Dr. John Hennessey and his veterinary assistant Ashley Saunders are having just a little trouble.
A standard-bred named Knows Nothing (who, to be fair, seems sharper than his handle suggests) is objecting to the “twitch” that will grab his nose and hold his head steady while Hennessey inserts an endoscope down a nostril to have a look at the horse’s respiratory system.
“He’s a little bit of a bugger,” laughs 24-year-old Saunders, a University of Guelph grad, as the snorting Knows Nothing, whom she’s worked with before, is finally secured.
“I love this job,” she says. “I just love it. Every day I just love going to work. I have Sundays off and I actually miss it.”
Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan was messing with a lot of hearts, and a lot of livelihoods, when he delivered a budget last Tuesday that proposed to scrap the Slots at Racetracks program that helped shore up the racing industry as lotteries and casinos changed the gaming culture over recent decades.
And in paddocks around the province, Duncan’s Liberal government is being called worse names than Saunders’ fond epithet for old Knows Nothing.
At Mohawk, amid the whinnies, the mucking out of stalls, the clatter of drivers’ “bikes,” the washing down of steaming horses fresh from the track, the squawking loudspeaker calling the field for the next race, they were trying to figure out the rationale for the government’s retreat from their business.
“It’s mind-boggling,” says Bill O’donnell, 63, a director of the Ontario Horse Racing Industry Association who’s been in the business since his Nova Scotia boyhood. “We are completely confused. We haven’t had any dialogue hardly with them.”
O’donnell was informed of the move only the night before Duncan’s announcement earlier in March that the government intended to end the $345million-a-year program as part of an Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. overhaul.
THE SLOTS AT RACETRACKS
program was established in 1998 as racetracks, once an entertainment focal point in small-town Ontario, watched revenues siphoned off by lotteries and casinos.
It was intended to support the industry by covering the costs of operating and maintaining the racetrack facilities in which the Olg-operated slots were housed.
Revenues were shared among the province, local municipalities, tracks and horse owners and breeders. The province took 75 per cent, the track 10, the “horse people” 10, the host municipality five.
Slots at Racetracks generated $1.1 billion for the OLG annually — which the racing industry figured was a pretty good payoff on the provincial investment, perhaps even the best public-private partnership Ontario had ever struck.
So, to the industry, the Liberal decision is as calamitous as it is bewildering. Already, hundreds of jobs have been lost due to slot closures at Windsor, Fort Erie and Sarnia — communities that can least afford that kind of employment hit.
What those in the business particularly resent is the government’s suggestion that those affected are mostly wealthy racetrack and horse owners.
Jeff Gillis of Ideal Training Centre in Acton trains 65 horses and employs 21 people full-time.
“There are a lot of people making a living,” he says. “But there are very, very few making a great amount. It’s mostly bluecollar, hard-working people that this industry’s made up of.”
Ben Baillargeon of Rockwood trains 52 horses. He came to Ontario from Montreal 14 years ago because this province “looked like the place to be. I raised my family here.”
At the moment, Baillargeon employs 12 people. “We’ll have to reduce. I will have to cut in half for sure.”
“We’re very concerned,” says Gillis. “It’s been a pretty good partnership (between government and the tracks) and to put that all at risk is foolhardy.”
IN THE PADDOCK
at Mohawk, veterinarians, owners, breeders, trainers, drivers, grooms — all engaged in the palpable labour of love that is the horse industry — say the province doesn’t seem to have a clue how far its decision will ripple through the economy. “I can’t think of anything in the rural areas that it won’t have an effect on,” says O’donnell.
The chain-reaction goes something like this:
Without the purse money supported by the Slots in Racetracks program, it will become economically unfeasible to breed, raise and train horses to race.
And the loss, in a business that supports about 60,000 jobs, ripples out in ways paddock denizens don’t think the government has recognized.
It will hit vehicle manufacturers whose trucks and trailers fill the Mohawk parking lot. It will hit feed dealers and the farmers who make ends meet selling hay and straw to horse owners. It will hit small-town tack shops, blacksmiths and hardware stores. It will hit barn builders and even the rubber manufacturer who provides the large m floors of stalls and pa
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He says the compounding pharmacy he deals with employs 20 people and does half its business in equine care.
“If the bottom drops out of this, there will be 10 jobs laid off at a compounding pharmacy. The spinoffs like that are crazy. They have no idea.”
THE MOVE IS ESPECIALLY curious considering Ontario is regarded as the mecca of horse-racing on the continent and its Sire Stakes program, which rewards breeders for raising quality yearlings, is considered a model in the world. The Ontario Mare Residency program encourages owners to keep their mares in the province for 180 days around foaling, with all the economic activity that stimulates.
“In 2010, there were 4,059 mares bred in Ontario to 130 stallions,” says O’donnell. “That’s a lot of horses.”
Henrietta Kingshott and her trainer husband have a farm they worked decades to buy. She says she has a half-dozen mares she hasn’t booked for breeding and horses with “foals in their bellies and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to raise them.
“What becomes of those horses? What do you do with them when you can’t afford to feed them? I know what happens to those horses.”
It’s been the horse breeders who have been hit first, with some bookings already cancelled by owners uncertain what the industry will look like in two or three years.
Jim Carr of Hamilton owns the stallion Big Jim, who was world champion as a two-year-old and is in his first year standing as stud.
His “book” for breeding about130 mares was closed by February, Carr said. But already eight people have cancelled and some of the 120 shareholders in his syndicate have withdrawn. Carr is arranging to send Big Jim to New Zealand.
“I wasn’t going to send him, but I don’t know where the industry’s going here.”
Says Kingshott, “He’s already bailing on one of the top stallions to stand in Ontario to try to get ahead of the rush (out of the province.) That hurts Ontario in every which way and form.”
A LITTLE NORTH of Mohawk, in the cen-
“In relation to what it’s costing them, it’s next to nothing, and yet they’re willing to kill a program that stimulates 60,000 jobs in Ontario and that actually makes them money . . . It just blows my mind.” PAT MEYERS VETERINARIAN
tral Ontario countryside that is the heart of the province’s horse country, veterinarian Pat Meyers and his wife, Anna, run Emerald Ridge breeding farm.
How much does Anna love it? Well, when she was a little girl “I wouldn’t clean my room, but I’d go clean a stall in a heartbeat.”
Anna says the 60-kilometre radius around Campbellville has the same horse density as Lexington, Ky. But these are nervous days.
With the threat of a crashing market, Anna says they essentially have the investment of three years’ crops in the field — the pregnant mares that won’t give birth for almost a year, the foals just born, and the year-olds that are to be sold next fall.
Standardbred horses are bred by artificial insemination. The little lab in the barn where the Meyers’ stallions are boarded probably has $60,000 worth of equipment in it, Pat estimates.
Plus the investments in building supplies — all made locally — that have seen a new barn and vast fields of paddocks built in recent years. And the high-tech audio-video gear that monitors pregnant mares around the clock.
All of this is a long-term investment for breeders. And their sole income comes once a year at the yearling sale.
“So you can imagine when government says the Slots at Racetracks program is gone, what does that do for our yearly paycheque this fall?” says Anna. “Our yearlings have very little perceived value now.
“I don’t think they have any idea of the ripple effect.”
MOST PEOPLE CAN THINK of only a couple of possible explanations for the government decision.
“Ignorance is one of them,” says Pat. “The fact that the Liberals have the majority of their seats in urban Ontario is another thing.
“In relation to what it’s costing them, it’s next to nothing, and yet they’re willing to kill a program that stimulates 60,000 jobs in Ontario and that actually makes them money . . . It just blows my mind.”
Horse people have bristled, too, at the suggestion that the government is making an ethical choice between racetracks on one hand or schools and hospitals on the other, noting that a great deal of the government’s share of revenue from the track slots has gone to those causes.
For people and families, the cost of it all is potentially profound.
As Hennessey says, a lot of the folks who make their living around horses got into it young, learned on the job and don’t have much in the way of education to fall back on. It’s a pretty short trip, he said, to hardship.
“They can’t go be a welder somewhere else,” he says. “They’ve done this their entire lives and there’s no place for them to go. If they’re losing a job here, it goes directly to a welfare line.” As for the horses? It is as Henrietta Kingshott was hinting but couldn’t bring herself to say.
“What are we going to do with these animals if you’ve got no market for them?” says Bill O’donnell.
“Our fear is Kitchener is going to be full of them.”
That’s where the slaughterhouse is.