TORONTO – City council will debate allowing a casino to be built within Toronto if Councillor Mike Layton gets his way.
Layton announced Friday afternoon that he had convinced a majority of Toronto city councillors to support a motion to debate the casino on Tuesday.
“It’s certainly not lefties posturing; it’s a broad spectrum of councillors saying ‘we want to have the debate. We put it in our schedule. You deferred it once, you delayed it once, you are not going to delay it again, we deserve a right to debate the item’” Layton said.
City council had been scheduled to debate the item on Tuesday.
But on Thursday afternoon, Mayor Rob Ford announced he cancelled the debate.
Ford said he did not want council to have a “divisive” debate without the details of the province’s hosting fee formula.
The formula determines how much a city which hosts a casino would gain in revenue each year.
The finance minister’s office confirmed late on Thursday that the new hosting fee formula would bring in approximately $53 million for the city of Toronto.
The mayor had demanded at least $100 million and said without that target, he would not support a casino.
Comments