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Hahaha, kidding. They told him, “You’ll have to file a Freedom of Information request.” After batting around the FOI form for a while, they admitted to Bruser that their unrecoverable losses on house credit total $10.4 million in 605 accounts since 2010. These losses are divided amongst the credit departments of four casinos, but OLG would not say how. After all, the casino operators they license have reputations to protect.

You might be thinking, as I would if I were an Ontarian, that OLG also has money to protect. And you might be wondering if it is doing such a nifty job. Giving away $10-million worth of casino chips is not a good look for a public trust. It is, at the least, a very obvious pathway to corruption.

Agents for a private, for-profit casino in Vegas or Atlantic City might “comp” a well-known customer, a big-spending “whale” type, to keep him at the table, hoping that the house will get back what it risks and then some. But they would do it knowing that any losses came out of their own bottom line — not out of the state’s budget for hospitals and roads. Private casinos can act pretty fast to fire employees who lose them money.

Ten million dollars is a drop in the bucket next to the OLG’s overall revenues, as the corporation swiftly pointed out to Bruser once they were obligated to start talking about the losses. And maybe the practice of advancing house credit does lead to higher net earnings overall, even when the defaults are taken into account. If so, it should be a simple matter for OLG to demonstrate this, and that should be required. Remember, this is the same agency that let its retail partners rip off lottery customers for years by cashing in discarded winning tickets. You may remember how truculently OLG behaved when reporters and statisticians found evidence that this was happening, and how it had to be shamed into adding new protections for lotto winners.