What will Metro casino look like?
On Sunday, after almost a week of airplanes, taxis, shuttle buses, rental cars, and hotels, I set out from my own home in my own car for Charles Lutes Road in the northwest corner of Moncton.
I park the car and get out and stare at a vacant parcel of land, trying to imagine it as Metro Moncton's casino field of dreams.
It's hard to see much at 2:30 in the morning, but I was up anyway, having just touched down in Moncton 90 minutes earlier. After visiting casinos in Calgary, Vancouver and all around Toronto, I'm not quite yet feeling like I'm in my own time zone.
From what I've seen of the seven casinos I've toured, the two I saw only from the outside, and the dozen more I researched online before setting out last Tuesday, I've come to understand no two casinos bear any more than a passing resemblance to each other.
The equipment is pretty much the same. A roulette wheel is a roulette wheel anywhere you go, and I think just about every casino I visited had a popular slot machine built around a Top Gun theme, which combines gambling with elements of video games.
Every casino I looked at has slot machines that take anything from a penny to a dollar to place a bet. All have at least a few progressive slots, where jackpots come against huge odds but offer huge rewards. Networked with other progressives in other casinos, when one does pay, it pays potentially life altering sums based on a percentage of how much money gamblers have put in all the machines in the network.
All casinos tend to have separate poker and high stakes rooms for players only, just off the main gaming area. Even the smallest I've seen feature at least local musicians or comedians to offer entertainment besides gambling. And every one seems to have at least two restaurants and one bar.
Apart from that, every casino has its own unique design and individual size. These are not Wal-Marts.
That's why it's a bit of a struggle to picture how all I've seen will translate to a Metro Moncton context. That's especially true because of the scant details that have been so far released about the winning proposal among the four the Province of New Brunswick allowed to bid on the province's first casino.
I'm not even sure I'm looking at the correct parcel of land.
While sources have hinted it's this long wedge between the Charles Lutes Road and Highway 2, others have suggested it will actually be across the street on the old Green Acres trailer park land. Still others would suggest I'm standing at the wrong intersection with Highway 2, the Trans-Canada Highway, and that the casino will actually be built where Day and Ross currently sits off Mapleton Road, a few kilometres to the east of here. When we at the Times & Transcript last checked the provincial land registry, we found nothing registered to any name we could connect to the winning partnership of four companies.
In yet another of those endless examples of how small the world's second largest country feels, I was going through security at the airport in Calgary the other day when the friendly security screener looked at my New Brunswick driver's licence and told me she was from Prince Edward Island.
That's not the surprising small world part by any means. Not counting all the American tourists I talked to in Richmond and Niagara Falls, nine out of every 10 people I met on my five-day, 8,000 mile journey had friends or family near Moncton.
The surprise was Scott Allison standing in line behind me. When the screener asked what had taken me so far from home and I quickly mentioned Moncton getting a casino, Scott, the Missisauga-based vice president of sales and marketing for Marriott Hotels & Resorts Canada, said, "Hey, we bid on that too."
He was part of the bid by Marriott in partnership with Bernard Cyr and Ashford Properties for a downtown casino, convention centre and hotel complex. Admitting his camp was disappointed their proposal for what they thought the community wanted, a downtown development away from churches with dynamic local partners, was rejected, he was nevertheless graceful in defeat.
To my disappointnment, he neither dished about the winning proposal, nor divulged any of the proponents' plans.
At the end of a long day and a long week, I'm still left looking at a dark field and wondering what it will look like all lit up.
Not to say I haven't learned a lot.
I know most Canadian cities who hired extra police when casinos came to town ended up not seeing the extra crime they expected. On the other hand, River Rock in Richmond had a couple of incidents of gamblers being robbed of their winnings when they first opened. I walked home alone from their casino without incident Thursday night, however, and I caught a glimpse of a newscast here in Moncton Monday telling me a Richmond man was stabbed to death over the weekend at a campground. So are casinos and crime connected as directly as some claim? I'm not so sure.
I know a 1997 Harvard Medical Review study did a meta-analysis of 120 other studies into pathological gambling in the United States and Canada and determined 1.5 per cent of the population could be defined as pathological, or addicted, gamblers.
The respected study found 5.4 per cent of the population is affected by gaming if you combine the total pathological gamblers with those whose behaviours could be defined as problem gambling.
On the other hand, I've learned the occasional casino bathrooms that have signs asking people not to flush diapers down the toilets are not dealing with the illegal possibility of babies in their casinos. They are speaking to grownups who would rather wear adult diapers than give up a slot machine or game when they feel they're on a roll.
I've learned it's a commonly expressed view in the gaming industry, but rarely stated as bluntly as one security worker put it when I asked about keeping gambling addicts out of casinos.
"We don't just do it just because it's for their own good. It's good for us. They're usually flat broke and not worth the hassle."
I've learned smart casinos cater to Chinese Canadians with restaurant menus and gaming options like Pai Gow, because there is a high interest in gambling in Chinese culture.
I've been told Canadian casinos wil next month face a host of new regulations to avoid being used by criminals to launder money. I've learned from independent sources outside the gaming industry that money launderers like to try and use casinos for money laundering, but they also like to try using the charter banks too.
When it comes to employment opportunities, I've learned casino workers are highly mobile. Most who learned about my casino tour pumped me with more questions about the other casinos than I could ask them about theirs.
Many casinos do their own training or rely on already skilled casino workers to fill their labour needs. Some offer courses for potential employees, but there is a charge to take part. Blackjack courses for prospective dealers at the new expanded Stampede Casino in Calgary will cost you $150.
While about 6,000 casino workers across Canada are unionized, that is far from uniform throughout the industry, which the Canadian Gaming Association says has 135,000 employees. While some casinos pay little more than minimum wage, jobs can still be lucrative because of tipping. With most casinos open either 24 hours a day or from 10 a.m to 3 a.m. every day of the year except Christmas, shift work is, of course, part of working in the industry.
Most of the 5,000 people who work in Niagara Falls' two casinos are not unionized. As management eliminates full-time positions in favour of all part-time staffs, the workers are currently being courted by two unions.
I discover Casino Niagara and Fallsview Casino Resort are competitors on the surface, but they are both operated by Falls Management Company and generate close to $1 billion in annual revenue, with more than $300 million of that going to the Province of Ontario.
By comparison, the Province of New Brunswick expects to reap about $25 million a year from the Moncton casino.
Here's a promising factoid. Researching casinos on behalf of the U.S. Congress, Adam Rose, an economist at Penn State University, concluded nine years ago, "a new casino of even limited attractiveness, placed in a market that is not already saturated, will yield positive economic benefits on net to its host economy."
I've detected a problem of perception and patronizing ageism in concerns about senior citizen gambling.
According to research conducted in 1999 for the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, the commission convened by the U.S. Congress, a smaller proportion of senior citizens gamble than any other adult age group.
You do seem to see a lot of senior citizens in casinos, but I slowly realized this week you just notice them more because they seem incongruous in a nightclub sort of setting. With the tight security and strict rules of behaviour in casinos, seniors can actually feel more safe and comfortable than they perhaps would in other nightlife settings.
This unique character of casinos finally dawned on me after about three days. I saw two young Asian Canadian women, dressed to the nines for a night out on the town, playing cards with a distinguished silver-haired octogenarian with a British accent, his white eyebrows the size of field mice. I couldn't imagine any other place these three might have met and shared an entertainment. And while they didn't look out of place in their evening clothes, neither did people look out of place in jeans and sweatshirts.
It's the one impression of all I've seen of casinos that keeps coming back to me now that I'm returned home.
In an odd way, a casino is a great melting pot.
Whether it will be a jackpot, for either its patrons, or Metro Moncton, remains to be seen.
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Go see Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods in Conn - you can drive them both, a couple hours south of Boston. They even have Tim Horton's in Maine and Rhode Island to make it feel more like home!
of people that were happy before. Just read the news around cities
that have casinos. That point of view we never hear about it except
in documents reports. And that is my opinion.