Reaction from Sault Ste. Marie was swift following the release of the province's Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services, which is recommending the closure of one of two Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLGC) offices—one of which is located in the Sault.
Recommendation 17-3 of the document, also known as the Drummond report, suggests improving efficiency at the OLGC by closing one of the two head offices, located in Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto; closing one of the two casinos in Niagara Falls; allowing slot machines at sites other than racetracks; and ending the subsidization of lottery terminals while introducing other point-of-sale locations.
While recognizing that “everyone and every institution in the province needs to fairly and proportionately share in the burden that may need to come with changes,” Sault Mayor Debbie Amaroso wrote in a letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty that the closure of the Sault Ste. Marie OLGC office would be “devastating to Sault Ste. Marie and to Northern Ontario.”
A “shot in the arm” to the struggling community when it was established in the 1990s, the OLGC office follows a trend of relocating Northern jobs to southern Ontario, Amaroso wrote.
“OLGC has anchored our community for the last 20 years in many ways,” she wrote. “This corporation has been an excellent corporate citizen, very much involved in every way in community events. It provides many excellent job opportunities for our young (and even not so young) people. It also provides a great sense of prestige to our community's profile by its presence and its involvement. It is now difficult to imagine Sault Ste. Marie without the OLGC head office.”
Amaroso urged the premier to “dismiss any suggestion that the OLGC head office in Sault Ste. Marie would close.” She noted that the lottery office was originally introduced to combat a difficult economy brought on by downturns in the forestry, mining and steel sectors, suggesting that those issues need to be “revisited.”
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