Thank you.
Currently the only backbone for the horse industry's business is parimutuel wagering. The industry operates the only legal single-event sports betting in Canada today, and it allows racetracks to earn income from legal wagers that are used to cover the substantial costs to produce our content. The parimutuel wagering also allows for profits to be shared with horse people, horse associations, breeding programs and horse aftercare programs.
As you have heard from Bill Ford of Racetracks of Canada, parimutuel wagering is a betting system in which all bets of a particular type are placed together in a pool, with payouts determined by the sharing of the pool among the winning wagerers, while fixed-odds payouts are agreed at the time a bet is made. Fixed-odds betting has mass appeal to large wagerers. The new generation of wagerers and large wagerers have grown up betting on points spread, much like you see in the National Football League.
This distinction is at the heart of the gravest risk to the Canadian horse-racing industry as your committee considers sports betting legislation. If the private member's bill, Bill C-218, is passed with its current language, it will allow others to offer fixed-odds wagering on horse racing. The horse-racing market is a zero-sum game. Horse-racing wagerers who would access fixed-odds betting will move away from the Canadian parimutuel pools. This will dramatically cannibalize the Canadian horse-racing industry's market share, and these operators would earn the revenue without contributing to the substantial costs of producing our content.
In other major sports betting jurisdictions in the world, notably Australia, fixed-odds wagering on horse racing has surpassed parimutuel wagering. In both Australia, and more recently in New Jersey, one of the first to implement and coordinate horse racing with sports betting, the government has introduced frameworks to protect the horse-racing industry.
We are requesting that private member's bill, Bill C-218, adopt language to protect the horse-racing industry. To do otherwise will ultimately destroy our industry.
Bill C-13, recently introduced by the federal government, has language to protect the industry from this risk. It is now incumbent on the government to insert its own language in the private member's bill to save an industry and the livelihoods of more than 50,000 families across this country.