In a special April 2014 report submitted by Ontario’s Auditor General (OAG) to the provincial Legislative Assembly, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation’s (OLG) Modernization Plan was rebuked as overly ambitious.

Based on Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s evaluation, the OLG presented financial projections for 2013 through 2018 that were largely hinged on OLG’s modernization plans of building at least five (5) new casinos in Ontario communities, even if such plans lacked proper stakeholder consultations with the municipalities concerned.

Contrary to OLG’s expectation, the large communities, such as Ottawa and Toronto, opted to reject OLG’s proposed casino expansion project in their respective municipality. As a result therefore, the Canadian crown corporation was constrained to lower its CA$4.6 billion profit projections from 2013 to 2018, down to about CA$2.2 billion. Such action demonstrated OAG Lysyk’s assessment that OLG’s Modernization Plan is not only overly ambitious but overly optimistic as well, since the OLG had merely assumed that the potential host communities will agree to the casino project.

One of OLG’s modernization plans entailed relocating slot positions in racetracks and in the five new casinos to be constructed in densely populated communities. In order to carry out the modernization plans, the provincial government approved the cancellation of the “Slots at Racetracks Program” (SARP).

However, the SARP cancellation placed Ontario’s horse racing industry at a disadvantage, since the industry and the communities affected, lost a veritable source of substantial revenue. Accordingly the SARP brought in as much $347 million as revenue to the horse racing communities since 2012.

nasmuch as OLG’s proposed casinos did not materialize, the Ontario government instead introduced the 5-year Horse Racing Partnership Program as transition and support funding to the communities affected by the scrapping of SARP, for which the government released CA$500 million as investment.