So it seems the desperate for cash Ontario government has come up with a new way of making money. They're getting into online gambling.

I seldom gamble recreationally because I have to do too much of the real life version when it comes to my career. But a lot of people do, with off-shore sites now reaping Billions in profits.

I'll leave the morality of governments getting into all that to others. At least the problem gambler suicides will likely happen at home now instead of causing a nasty scene in a casino washroom.

As an economic decision, owning a virtual casino probably looks pretty good in theory. But Canadian governments are also the only casino operators in the world who have consistently not done well at the trade.

Some of that's due to their insistence on supporting their social programs by eliminating smoking, free drinks and other frowned upon vices in their establishments. The mindset which once decreed you had to buy a meal in Ontario before you could order a drink on the Sabbath is alive and well.

Most of the losses, however, come from running while also regulating the industry.  I had a Las Vegas casino manager once tell me that he'd turned down a job in Canada because it was career suicide -- "Everybody knows you're part of a rigged game up there".

His point was that when you both own the casino and make its rules, the house has an even bigger advantage, one it can't help but exercise when times get tough. Players eventually realize their chances of winning are always being reduced and they take their money elsewhere.

And it would appear the same approach will eventually turn online gambling into a money losing government initiative. In order to sell the idea, Ontario insists it will limit the amount of time anyone can play as well as how much they can wager over a set period of time. Yeah, that'll make the hard core players close out their accounts in Antigua.

They also claim they'll operate more secure and trustworthy sites than those off-shore fly-by-nighters. Tell that to folks in British Columbia, whose government opened their own online casino last month. The site went down in the first hour after it was discovered that dozens of accounts had been hacked so gamblers could bet with somebody else's money.  Four weeks later, they still aren't open for business.

But here's where this impacts those of us who make movies and TV for a living.

To be successful at the poker table, you need to know how to play the cards you're dealt. But more important, you need to know what the other guys at the table probably have in their hands. That means reading the "tells", those little ticks and idiosyncrasies that telegraph whether or not somebody is bluffing.

Well, our governments aren't bluffing. They're financially stretched to the limit.

Tell #1: This morning, amid reports that an entire hospital ward in Victoria is being readied for hundreds of arriving Tamil refugees thought to be suffering from Tuberculosis, I heard one Toronto talk show caller assert that her husband can't get speech therapy because the Ontario Health Insurance Plan claims they can no longer afford to fund his treatment.

Tell #2: Despite mounting evidence that the newly introduced HST is wreaking havoc with construction trades and the real estate market, that restaurant business is off 25 - 40% and even golf courses have seen a precipitous drop in greens fees, the Legislature is not rethinking its implementation.

Tell #3: Although thousands of artists mounted a spirited campaign against the British government's decision to axe its version of Telefilm, the UK Film Council, that decision is final.

Our governments will need to go "All-in" sometime soon. And let's not forget who brought the deck we're all playing with and shuffled the cards.

The Minister in charge of the UKFC went so far as penning a column for the Left leaning Guardian to lay out his reasoning for closing down the UKFC, noting how many millions had been saved in everything from car allowances to officials' salaries. In effect, claiming that more money could flow to filmmakers now than had under government supervision.

You gotta know somebody over here is reading that column, noting how little a public anxious over its own health care and crumbling roads seemed to care and is putting a checkmark next to Arts funding on their "Where can we cut" list.

Those are the cards we're about to be dealt. Maybe in the next federal budget. Maybe in the first one that follows our next election. So we need to start getting ready to play this hand as intelligently as we can.

I've heard all the arguments about every dollar spent on the Arts multiplying "X" fold. For years American governments claimed every dollar in Food Stamps created $1.71 in the broader economy. Now they are cutting the Food Stamp Program back. You can use statistics a lot of ways, but they've never seemed to work in our favor.

We can threaten that governments don't want to piss off the Arts community. But that's the same argument that says they have to bring Omar Khadr home to placate the Muslim community or allow boatloads of Tamil refugees to land so as not to upset their Diaspora.

Artists don't vote in blocs anymore than Muslims do and for every artist you satisfy you piss off some guy hanging drywall. We need to get out of Groupthink and start thinking about what helps us as a Group that's part of a broader culture.

I've long advocated weaning ourselves off the government teat. But we're still going to need to find sustenance somewhere.

Maybe the financing can be found online. But with a massive government sponsored campaign pending to tell Canadians how easy and fun it is to spend their web time gambling, that uphill battle will get much steeper in the short term.

In my opinion, our best strategy is to lobby for clearing the shelf space for the goods we already sell and then making their availability known.

In past postings, I've talked about setting aside a specific percentage of movie screens for Canadian content and mounting initiatives to encourage networks into putting more Canadian programming in Prime Time. Maybe that won't solve all we're facing, but it will help us survive until the economy gets better or smarter ideas come along.

Because when you're sitting at a table with somebody who needs money right now and doesn't care who he has to hurt to get it, your best option is to find another game.

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I'm going to lay off my personal battle with government bureaucrats for a while.

Just as soon as I finish telling you this little story...

My dad lives in Victoria, BC, known as Canada's home to "the newly wed and nearly dead". A good proportion of the city's inhabitants are retirees and a significant number of those get around on "scooters".

These aren't the trendy Vespas made famous in "Quadraphenia" and "Roman Holiday" which are now enjoying a resurgence among the urban hip. Instead, they're mostly four wheeled tanks with sturdy names like "Gladiator", "Trooper" and "Shoprider" purchased from places that also specialize in adult diapers.

For those who have lost their drivers licenses or the physical ability to drive a car, they're a very reliable means of retaining some semblance of self-reliance, independence and a small ration of freedom in a world that can become proscribed, isolated and socially limited.

But for those who work in government and can create multiple man-years of employment by finding new ways to regulate the lives of others, the mobility scooter is an impending scourge, the next H1N1 Killer Bee menace bearing down on us as the Boomer generation approaches its final demographic.

You see these little one person coaches everywhere in Victoria, rolling along the sidewalks, chugging down the aisles at Walmart, parked at the outfield fences of ballparks where the geriatric bleacher bums are less likely to be hit up for spare change to cover the cost of umpires.

Powered by environmentally friendly electric motors, silent but for the flap of their little orange warning flags, allowed in stores and malls so there is no need to build special parking spaces for them; they are sturdy workhorses that meet and surpass every idealistic benchmark our governments insist we ought to achieve with our cars.

Never mind that they also help the local economy by ferrying grannies to bingo and shut-ins to movie matinees. Ignore how much they reduce the prescription costs of anti-depressants. Don't even think of all the lottery ticket and postage stamp revenue that would stop flowing to governments if fewer of the group who most purchase those items were riding them.

All of that apparently isn't good enough for the bureaucrats.

For it seems there was a tragic incident in one of Victoria's suburbs last winter in which a Senior tipped off a raised curb into the path of a dump truck. Apparently, said Senior (deceased as a result) had been travelling at a high rate of speed just prior to his unfortunate sudden departure from this life.

How fast was he going?

An almost unbelievable 16 Km/hour (9 mph for those unfamiliar with metric).

And as a result, moves are afoot to restrict scooters to a maximum of 12 kph (7 mph) in a campaign designed to eventually license those who sell, service and ride the machines as well as regularly test scooter owners while imposing fines and scooting suspensions on any who choose to flout the new laws.

One can only begin to comprehend the number of government agencies which will ultimately have to become involved in the crusade.

What's of the utmost import here is (of course) that we protect Seniors from themselves and the rest of us from the -- ahem -- "road rage" perpetrated by scooter riders arrogantly insensitive in their recklessness.

Those exact concerns were voiced last week by Victoria Deputy Police Chief John Ducker after describing an incident in which an elderly man on a scooter "rammed" the shins of a motorist getting out of his car with such force that he "drew blood".

Although no charges were laid and nobody required any medical attention, Ducker didn't mince words in his condemnation of the growing carnage on his streets…

"This is a new era we're coming into. I'm no psychologist, but it seems when these people use their electric scooters they develop a sense of entitlement, as if they have a right of way on the sidewalk. I see it in a lot of them, in their body language and their comments and their demeanor."

Now, speaking only from personal experience, I've been skewered by umbrellas wielded by harried businessmen on the sidewalks of Victoria. I've been bowled over by cyclists kitted out for the Tour de France who were obviously trying to catch the peloton. I once even watched a skateboarder who'd been barked at by a tiny dog threaten to butcher and bbq the animal in front of its terrified owner.

But so far, I haven't had my shins skinned by any rickety Clint Eastwood biting down hard on a Werther's and asking whether or not I feel lucky.

However, we are led to believe that the streets of Victoria will soon be aflame. And to understand where that kind of rhetoric comes from, you need to read the Deputy Chief's comments in the context of his position.

For the Victoria police have one of the country's highest per capita incidences of police brutality charges. Some of that could be the result of too many nights when the fleet's in. But a guy like me who's spent a lot of time with a lot of cops in far more dangerous neighborhoods has noticed more than once that members of the Victoria PD tend to get all G20 on many who just aren't in a position to fight back. The homeless. Teenagers. Guys like this.

Meanwhile, if Victoria's police department is anything like the ones in Toronto and a lot of other cash strapped Canadian cities, you know that more and more of their time is spent raising revenue than fighting crime.

So, if your police department is made up of guys who aren't allowed to do the real job and also seem the type who get a woody watching episodes of CTV's "The Bridge", what better way to have them appear really effective and respectable than by turning them loose on another group who can't put up much resistance?

And bureaucrats are always eager to get behind that kind of enterprise.

In Ontario, the deaths of three seriously drunk teenagers who came from extremely wealthy and influential families has led to one incarnation after another of laws designed to make sure such a tragedy never happens again. The current zero tolerance approach just passed could see anybody under 21 jailed if even their mouthwash causes a breathalyzer needle to quiver.

So far, the Victoria chapter of the "We need a new law" brigade have supplied recommendations to change mobility scooter regulations to:

Health Canada

Federal Transportation Minister John Baird

BC's Superintendant of Motor Vehicles

The Executive Director of BC Municipalities

All BC Mayors and Administrators

The impending avalanche of studies, reports and regulatory amendments coming from all this will make anything Nature does in the Rockies this Winter pale by comparison.

Imagine how many millions will be spent -- because one guy zoomed off a sidewalk.

EXCEPT:

There's a little more to that story.

For it seems the Senior who ignited this frantic need to fix the death scooter problem hadn't just gone with throttle up. According to the Coroner's report, the gentleman suffered from physical paralysis, poor balance and often acted impulsively because of several previous strokes.

He was also traveling along a snow and slush covered sidewalk, appearing (according to the driver who struck him) to be moving "haphazardly" -- y'know, like you do when somebody hasn't shoveled the sidewalk or plowed the road…

What's more -- according to the mobility scooter industry, there is only one current model even capable of 16 kph, the Shoprider SE (Sports Edition?). And the vast majority of scooters only reach speeds of 8 or 9 kph. In other words, they couldn't achieve the proposed speed limit no matter how anti-social the driver might be -- let alone exceed it.

So what's this really all about?

Frank Furedi, a Sociology professor at the University of Kent and author of "The Politics of Fear" has long studied the impulse of bureaucrats to impose new rules to solve perceived problems, likening it to the Medieval belief that every natural phenomenon was rooted in either witchcraft or divine retribution. Professor Furedi calls the process "Intrusification".

It's a way to bring meaning to ordinary tragedies and assign blame -- even if the whole process is based on bias or superstition. As long as the only ones being pilloried or tied to a dunking stool don't have the power to fight back, the bureaucratic intrusion on the lives of others succeeds.

"They think their job is to save people from themselves" he says, describing an institutionalized contempt for "people who cannot be relied on to manage their everyday existence" -- or just are unfortunate enough to have shit happen to them.

Like the new teen drinking law in Ontario, the proposed scooter regulations in BC are opportunistic attempts to modify behavior in the false belief  that it will make life better for those affected instead of worse.

Mostly it keeps the bureaucrats employed at managing other people's lives instead of being out doing something worthwhile like, oh I don't know, shoveling the snow and ice off a city sidewalk?

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I'm not sure I'm a climate change denier. If something's going on that might irreparably damage the planet, I'd sure like to get to the bottom of it and do my part to fix it.

But I'm certainly one of those guys who's hesitant to climb on the Anthropomorphic Global Warming bandwagon.

There are a lot of reasons for that which can be backed up by things I've read about how those campaigning for carbon taxes and green initiatives went about providing their empirical proof that such things were necessary. 

There's also all those mega-polluting private jets and limos that seem to be in such demand whenever environmentalists gather to make rules the rest of us are supposed to live by.

But mostly, it's the scare tactics.

Like the stories about rising ocean levels submerging cities and making whole countries disappear. If those campaigning to get me to turn down my air conditioning and ride a bicycle really believe those predictions are such an inconvenient truth -- how come they're not asking Al Gore why he just bought a massive chunk of beach front property?

I do understand that the apocalyptic approach is a sure fire attention getter. But I also know that most things we're instructed to fear don't usually turn out to be all that scary…

Are those Killer Bees here yet?

…and often, there's somebody already thinking way outside the box those scare tacticians are trying to get us into so we can only view the world the way that works best for them.

The first minute of what follows will probably strike you as hare-brained Science Fiction. An impossibly implausible solution to 3 or 4 of the problems supposedly coming down the pike. But three minutes after that, I'm predicting you'll be sensing our future might be way cooler than you ever imagined.

Enjoy your Sunday.

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