Vancouver mega-casino backers bid to sway public opinion open

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Vancouver mega-casino backers bid to sway public opinion
PR campaign launched ahead of public hearing


VANCOUVER -- The backers of a controversial $450-million proposal to build the largest casino in Western Canada in downtown Vancouver are launching a campaign to try to sway public opinion as the issue heads to a public hearing in less than a week.

Today the B.C. Lottery Corporation, the B.C. Pavilion Corporation and the owners of a Nevada company trying to open a 1,500-slot machine casino and hotel complex adjacent to BC Place will meet reporters to try to correct what they say are “misstatements” being made by their opponents.

They face a growing headwind from some community groups, residents’ associations and a group of well-known and powerful Vancouverites who say the proposal by Paragon Gaming to expand an existing casino licence would fundamentally alter the city’s makeup.

The opposition claims casinos operate as “parasitic businesses” that drain money from other businesses and prey upon the elderly and low-income people.

More than 120 people have signed up to address council at the March 7 public hearing.

But in an interview Monday with The Vancouver Sun, PavCo chairman David Podmore said he believes the opposition largely gained a foothold because of a provincial government decision two years ago to cut back gambling-proceeds grants to non-profit groups. He said the expanded casino would create thousands of jobs and bring commercial vitality to the northeast side of False Creek.

The provincial funding cuts to arts and community groups enraged groups dependent on gambling revenue and whipped up a backlash just as Paragon’s expansion was being promoted, Podmore said.

“I don’t think there would have been this stir if it hadn’t been for the government making these changes to the social, arts and culture grants,” he said.

“There is absolutely no question that this made it more difficult for us. Is that what people are really objecting to and is that what really generated this fuss? I think it is. I think that is where it started.”

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PavCo, the B.C. Crown corporation that owns BC Place, has leased an adjacent parcel to Paragon Gaming on which the company wants to build the casino and two hotels.

BCLC is the Crown corporation that oversees gambling.

Paragon, formed in Las Vegas, owns the nearby 750-slot, 15-gambling table Edgewater Casino. It bought the licence in 2006 for $42 million after Edgewater entered receivership.

Podmore believes most of those who have signed a petition by Vancouver, Not Vegas!, the coalition leading the opposition, have probably not read the Paragon/BCLC proposal.

“I don’t know how they’ve informed themselves,” Podmore said. “I am a little bit suspicious as to how much each of those individuals have studied this proposal.”

Among those in the coalition are many former Vancouver city politicians and MLAs, architect Bing Thom, former Expo 86 commissioner Patrick Reid, and Peter Ditchfield, the former deputy chief of the Organized Crime Agency of B.C.

Former Vancouver councillor Peter Ladner, an outspoken critic of the casino, said opposition may have been started by aggrieved charities who didn’t like the government cuts to grants, but it has “morphed into a much greater debate about the future of our city.”

“Some people are actually likening this to the freeway debates [of the 1970s],” he said.

“It is about what Vancouver is and wants to be. The proponents will tell you they are just moving a casino and ramping it a bit. But I think it is going over a line and nobody in Vancouver has been asked if they want our stadium to be an annex to a casino.”

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Premier-designate Christy Clark has said she will revisit the B.C. government’s decision in 2009 to deeply cut the operating grants charitable groups receive. The province partly restored some funding in 2010, but critics say the level of support, coming as the province’s share of gambling revenues approaches $1 billion annually, is a pittance.

Meanwhile, Premier Gordon Campbell said he remains untroubled by the casino expansion project and says it would deliver much-needed jobs to the city.

On another issue, Podmore said in the interview that he remains troubled by former BCLC chairman T. Richard Turner’s involvement in Paragon and has told him he can’t be involved in any negotiations with PavCo.

Turner resigned from BCLC in 2005 and then formed Paragon Canada, which became a subsidiary of Paragon Developments. Turner gave a $50,000 donation to the B.C. Liberals in 2009, shortly before the request for proposals for the BC Place development closed on May 22, 2009.

He later acknowledged to the media that he had made investments in Paragon’s River Cree casino in Alberta while he was still the chair of BCLC. However, Paragon said he had no involvement in its application for the BC Place project.

Turner has said he was cleared of conflicts by the B.C. gaming policy and enforcement branch before he joined the board of Paragon.

But Podmore said on Monday he told Turner as recently as two months ago to stay away from the BC Place project.

“I told him he can’t have any involvement in the negotiations between PavCo and Paragon, and that our dealings must be with the principals, Scott Menke and Diana Bennett,” Podmore said.

Bennett is the daughter of the late William Bennett, the former owner of Circus Circus (now Mandalay Resort Group) and the Sahara Resort. Menke is William Bennett’s nephew. Documents Paragon filed for a casino application in Missouri indicate the two are the majority shareholders in the company.

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Artist's rendering of the proposed casino and hotel complex at BC Place in downtown Vancouver