In the last couple of days there’s been much confusion over whether Toronto would get a richer deal from a potential new casino than Ottawa would get from its potential new casino. After a Globe and Mail story last Friday blared that Toronto was getting a better deal on a new casino than other cities, Mayor Jim Watson dashed off a briskly worded letter to the OLG in which he threatened to pull out of the casino process if Toronto got preferential treatment on revenue-sharing fees. Not to worry, said Premier Kathleen Wynne in a statement and OLG CEO Rod Phillips said in an interview later that day: Toronto will be getting the same deal as other municipalities. “The approach is going to be consistent,” Phillips told our David Reevely on Friday. If that’s really the case — and the OLG insists that it is — then someone’s calculations are way off. As I laid out in my column in Tuesday’s Citizen, it was assumed by most people interested in this issue that Toronto was always going to get a special deal — and the publicly available numbers bear that out. More on the math in a minute. First, let’s briefly review the formula by which (most) municipalities are going to get a share of that gambling revenue from casinos. An updated funding formula was approved by Ottawa city council last fall, and is the same one sent to all municipalities who currently have OLG slots. After some weeks of confusion, Ottawa council came to terms with the fact that this formula would also apply to any new casino that is located in Ottawa, which I discussed in a column from late November 2012. Read more..