Troy Media/ - A trip to London, England, is wasted without spending a few hours in the National Gallery or the lavish British Museum, to see the wealth of plundered cultural artifacts of a global empire.
Entry to these - and more - is free thanks to perpetual funding of the United Kingdom’s National Lottery. The money saved (versus what you would spend just to enter Paris’s Louvre or any of the grand museums of Berlin) you can spend in the gift shop on art books to bring home.
From a tourist’s point of view, that’s lottery profits well-spent. From the perspective of a fan of our national sports programs, using lotteries to fund local athletes would likewise be a good investment. And from a taxpayer’s point of view as well.
According to the CBC, Canada’s Own the Podium program allots around $30 million a year to athletes aspiring to represent us at the Olympics.
The money is carefully targeted toward those expected to come home with medals, versus the happy amateur toilers who sacrifice and train every day just to “do their best” on the international stage.
Canada spent about $5.5 million for each of the medals our athletes won at the Rio Olympic Games. That’s half of what Australia paid per medal, says CBC.
In fact, Canada spends less per capita supporting national sports programs than Australia, New Zealand or the Netherlands. So our Olympians are pretty cost-efficient.
Where does the money come from? Far and away, it comes from corporate donors. Thirty-four major donors are listed on the Canadian Olympic Committee website.
Even you and I can donate to the Canadian Olympic Foundation and get a refund at tax time.
But this is an inefficient way to fund our athletes. Greater funding can be had, with more generalized support for all athletes as opposed to targeting winners.
The vehicle of choice should be our lotteries.
It’s unseemly how much of the roughly $14 billion a year in profits from legalized gambling in Canada finds its way into the general revenue of provincial governments.
Each lottery region spends millions a year on community sports, recreational and cultural infrastructure. Well and good. But hundreds of millions still end up in general government revenue, in lieu of legitimate taxation for legitimate spending.
On several levels, that’s just not right.
To fund athletes to represent us on the world stage, it would be more ethical to tap the billions that governments make from gambling than using this money to build schools or hire nurses - a task that should be shouldered by fair taxation from everyone.
Likewise, it’s better for Canada to assume responsibility for training athletes and presenting national role models than to give large corporations tax incentives to do so.
Let legitimate taxation fund our public sphere and keep the proceeds from gambling far away from political hands. Many a treatise on its corrupting nature has been written since governments became addicted to gambling.
There’s more than enough money to go around. There’s more than enough to build rinks, pools, fields and centres of excellence to foster the benefits of healthy living all around the country, at every level.
If we agree to pay our doctors more in the health-care system, for instance, we need consensus to pay for it from a fair system of taxation. Or ring roads, or whatever.
It is more ethical that we can choose to participate in a lottery, for instance, knowing that the vast profits come back to us in better cultural infrastructure, of which sports and athletics play a huge part (especially during Olympic years).
There are always priorities for governments to balance at budget time. That’s why we elect them. But giving them a slush fund of lottery money, while squandering more in tax incentives for corporations to bolster their public images, corrupts both politics and our general support for the Olympic movement.
National assets like Britain’s museums or Canada’s athletes cannot get consensus for increased taxation. So we turned to corporations to gain opportunities that taxpayers end up subsidizing anyway.
Let’s just take gambling profits out of politicians’ hands. Give this money back to communities for better cultural amenities, including high-performance sports.
Greg Neiman is a freelance editor, columnist and blogger living in Red Deer, Alta. Greg is included in Troy Media’s Unlimited Access subscription plan.
