Our Olympic athletes should be lottery-funded

A trip to London, England, is wasted without spending a few hours in the National Gallery or their 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 British National Lottery. With the money you save (versus what you would spend just to enter The 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 point of view of a fan of our national sports teams, lottery funding our 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 who are 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.

As such, Canada spent about $5.5 million for each of the medals our athletes won at the Rio Games. That's half of what Australia paid per medal, says CBC.

In fact, Canada spends less per capita supporting national sports teams than Australia, New Zealand or the Netherlands. If you look at it in these terms, our Olympians are pretty cost-efficient.

Where does the money come from? Far and away, it comes from corporate donors. In all, there are 34 major donors listed by the COC on their web page.

Even you and I can send a cheque to the Canadian Olympic Foundation, and get a refund at tax time.

I propose that this is an inefficient method of funding our national athletes, and that greater funding can be had, with more generalized support for all athletes on all teams, as opposed to targeting “winners.”

The vehicle of choice should be our lotteries.

There is something unseemly in how much of the roughly $14 billion a year in profits from legalized gambling in Canada finds itself in the general revenue pots of provincial governments.

Each lottery region spends millions a year on community sports, recreational and cultural infrastructure. Well and good. But hundreds of millions end up in the general revenue pot of governments, in lieu of legitimate taxation for legitimate spending.

On several levels, that's just not right.

As to the topic of funding our athletes to represent us on the world stage, it would be more ethical to tap the billions governments make from gambling for this, rather than using this money to build schools or hire nurses — a task which should be shouldered by fair taxation from everyone.

Likewise, it is 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 the corrupting nature of this has been written over the decades 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 what we elect them to manage. But giving them a slush fund of lottery money, while squandering more in tax incentives for corporations to bolster their public images, is a corrupting force both on 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 “win-win” opportunities that taxpayers end up subsidizing anyway.

Let's just take gambling profits out of politicians' hands. Give these profits back to communities for better cultural amenities (including high-performance sports).