Chris Selley: Doug Ford is in casino-building mode. Hang on to your wallets

Doug Ford has a plan. Yes, another one. The Ontario premier wants Niagara Falls to be the “Vegas of the north.” And he doesn’t mean a wasteland of cheap-and-dirty hotel rooms, all-you-can-eat buffets that used to be a great bargain but aren’t anymore, increasingly house-friendly blackjack odds and redlining customer dissatisfaction across the board, which is pretty much the story of modern Las Vegas. No, Ford wants some old-school razzle-dazzle.

Niagara Falls will be home to “All the big casinos in Las Vegas — we’re serious,” Premier P.T. Barnum vowed at a press conference in Niagara Falls on Monday, flanked by Mayor Jim Diodati. “It’s happening. Get on board. Come and put a proposal in. Come and tell us how you’re going to build a billion-dollar hotel with attractions, with cinemas inside, with live theatre. That’s what we’re looking for.”

There will be an entertainment district, enthused Ford. The plan includes a new five-star hotel, which is not something Niagara Falls ever seemed to need previously. There will be “a world-class observation wheel,” which is apparently what they call Ferris wheels now. They will remake a marina on the Niagara River into “a world-class recreation destination.”

World-class this, world-class that, world-class everything! Niagara Falls’ wax museum will be the envy of every other wax museum in the world, from Macau to Branson, Mo.! OK, I made that part up.

But for real, a plexiglass gondola thingy that will take you between major attractions, like the monorail in Las Vegas — or, ahem, the “people mover” in Detroit — only with what the Niagara Parks Commission calls “never-before-seen views of Niagara Falls and the surrounding landscape.”

Never seen before? Gosh! That waterfall has been there for decades!

This so-called “Niagara River Line …. will feature five key stations across a 7.6-kilometre route with panoramic glass passenger capsules,” the Niagara Parks website explains. For some reason these stations do not seem to include one near the train station that brings you from Toronto and its surrounding communities to Niagara Falls, which seems like an odd omission. But no matter. There will be theme parks! There will be, uh, wine tours! You could go see Funny Girl at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, maybe. OK, so, maybe the Vegas analogy doesn’t completely hold water…

Now, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about any of this. Premiers get behind projects like this all the time. There’s nothing wrong with Ford stumping for the Niagara region, or inviting Big Casino to take greater interest … although you would think Big Casino would know how and where to make money just fine. But this is, after all, part of a “multibillion-dollar strategy.” The taxpayer, Ford Nation’s supposed lodestar, is very much implicated.

Ford’s not just promising to facilitate tourism in the region. That would be fine. Better than fine: ideal! But no, he wants to be directly involved. No doubt he has talked to people, and they had opinions about what specifically should happen, and as so often happens with Ford, they quickly became his opinions.

The problems with this approach are many and obvious. Ford’s track record of making big bets on certain industries is not superb. We’ll need forensic accountants to figure out how much money Ontarians blew on electric-vehicle batteries. As an industry, casino gambling is not in the ascendancy. Millennials and gen Z have made it very clear that their gambling budget, if any, tends to go toward betting on sports. They can do that with their friends on their phones at the pub, or at home. But Ford knows what he likes, and he likes casinos and Ferris wheels, and we’re all living in his world now.

Ford, incidentally, is one of several premiers currently trying to decide what to do with a stockpile of American booze — the bottles they yanked off provincial liquor store shelves during that weird and mostly forgotten “Canada first” period. (Needless to say, California wines at the LCBO were not replaced with British Columbia wines. Living in Ontario, you would hardly know B.C. made wine at all.)

Still, the largest American casino companies, apparently, are most welcome — which some might call passing strange, considering the cast of characters. Casino gambling isn’t exactly an industry that’s infested with Democrats. The Adelson family, which controls Las Vegas Sands Corp. — market capitalization, US$45.3 billion — is among President Donald Trump’s biggest donors. Steve Wynn, founder of Wynn Resorts, was vice-chair of Trump’s 2016 inauguration committee.

In recent weeks and months I have heard conservatives fret about the rift between Ford and Pierre Poilievre, the theory being the movement can’t survive such conflict in the country’s largest province. I think it can survive that no problem: Ontario conservatism has always been different than Alberta conservatism. And I think Poilievre should wear that rift as a badge of honour, ideally reminding him every time he sees it in the mirror that the economy is not for the prime minister or premier to control.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com