With municipal election day landing on Monday, October 26, Sarnia voters are weighing candidates on the usual mix of roads, housing and taxes – but one issue that's stayed unusually close to the surface this campaign is the city's cut of gambling revenue, and what nearly happened to it.

 

At the centre of that story is Gateway Casino Sarnia, the slots facility at Hiawatha Horse Park on London Line, which operates under the province's Optional Slots at Racetracks Program. That program was always meant to be temporary when it brought gaming back to the site a few years ago, and last fall the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation confirmed the arrangement would lapse on March 31, without an extension. The announcement put as many as 50 casino jobs on the line, along with roughly $400,000 a year in revenue the city collects as its share of the take.

 

Incumbent Mayor Mike Bradley, who is seeking another term in this fall's race, was quick and blunt in his response. 'What I really don't understand is why they would do this. What happened?' he said at the time, calling the closure decision 'disappointing' and pointing out that OLG had offered no real explanation for pulling the plug on a facility the province itself had reopened only a few years earlier. Bradley pressed the province for answers and appealed directly to the Premier to have OLG account for the decision, noting the added strain it would put on a local economy already managing other setbacks.

 

He wasn't the only official to say so publicly. Ajax MPP Rob Cerjanec, Ontario's Liberal critic for Tourism, Culture and Sport, backed Bradley's call for transparency, telling reporters that closing the casino 'just six years later and not consider[ing] an extension of the agreement is unreasonable and a disservice to the community.' Cerjanec argued that residents and the workers whose jobs were on the line deserved a clearer account from the province of how the decision was made.

 

The pressure appears to have mattered. Even before the extension was confirmed, OLG had committed to one additional year of transition funding to soften the blow for the city's budget if the closure went ahead as planned. Then, late last year, OLG reversed course entirely, confirming a five-year extension of the racetrack slots program that keeps Gateway Casino Sarnia open well beyond its original closing date. The extension is expected to preserve an estimated 40 to 46 of the jobs that were at risk and keeps the city's share of gaming revenue flowing into municipal reserves rather than disappearing from the budget altogether.

 

Council hasn't stopped at simply defending what it already had, either. This past June, councillors took up a separate motion to expand the city's existing revenue-sharing agreement with OLG to capture a four percent cut of sports betting revenue generated at the same Gateway Casino site – covering both its in-person sportsbook and the digital betting kiosks now operating there. It's a recognition that legal sports wagering, which barely existed in Ontario a few years ago, has grown into a real enough revenue stream that municipalities hosting casinos are moving to formally claim a piece of it, on top of the traditional slots share.

 

That shift mirrors something happening well beyond city hall. As legal sports betting and online casino play have expanded across Ontario, a growing share of local gambling activity now happens on a phone rather than at a physical slot machine or card table. For Sarnia residents looking to do that through a properly licensed operator, sites that compile the best gambling sites in Canada have become a common starting point for comparing platforms that are actually regulated to serve Ontario players, rather than relying on guesswork. iGaming Ontario, the provincial body that licenses and oversees those operators, maintains its own public list of registered sites for anyone who wants to confirm a platform is operating legally before signing up.

None of this settles the broader debate over how much a city like Sarnia should lean on gambling revenue in its budget, a question that's likely to keep coming up regardless of who wins the mayor's chair on October 26. But it does mean whoever takes the job inherits a live, dollar-and-cents relationship with the province's gambling industry – one the outgoing mayor spent a good part of this term defending in public, and one voters have had a rare chance to watch play out in real time before casting a ballot.

 

For residents who want to see where the rest of the field stands heading into the vote, The Sarnia Journal's rundown of the certified candidates for this year's municipal election is a good place to start.