In August of last year, Cal Bricker was hired as the Senior Vice President of Horse Racing for the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation.

Bricker is part of a nine-person OLG team, now charged with ensuring the health and viability of the horse racing industry in the province. TROT Editor Darryl Kaplan sat down with Bricker to learn about his first year on the job and his vision of the future.

TROT: How has your experience been from day one to today?

BRICKER: I think that business is business and the weights and measures of business are fairly transferable from one place to another. But this business, in terms of its history, personalities and challenges, it’s unique. I’ve been here for a year now and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been to a lot of farms, I’ve been to all the tracks, and a lot of races, and every time I go out I learn something new. I see a lot of passion.

People are fully invested in the business. They employ others and in the cases of many of the smaller tracks, the track is the centre of the community, and its vibrancy is critical to those communities. From the outside that may not be all that evident. But when you go to Leamington or Clinton or Hanover, or any of these places, you’ll see how important racing is to them.

TROT: You’ve transitioned from an OLG that had a very different focus, to an OLG that says horse racing is very important to you. How have you been able to create a bridge from the past to the future?

BRICKER: There’s a lot of good news in the fact that it’s the OLG as the agency in government responsible for horse racing, in that there is a latent understanding in the agency for racing as we’ve been co-located at racetracks for a long time. There’s a lot of interest among people in OLG in horse racing, especially at many of these tracks where the vibrancy of the sport affects them too.

I’ve found that OLG has been incredibly receptive at the most senior level. Stephen Rigby (President and CEO, OLG) is intimately familiar with all the stuff going on in horse racing and very involved with it. It’s a focus of a lot of our activity right now. It’s good that this is all going on because this is probably the most exciting time for horse racing in memory, irrespective of SARP (Slots at Racetracks Program). I get a sense of an opportunity to put the industry on a sustained footing, not just for the immediate future, but for the long term.

TROT: Is horse racing a part of the larger discussions of OLG?

BRICKER: I report to the CEO. I can tell you one of his objectives is to create a sustainable horse racing industry in the province. The Ministry of Finance, Minister Sousa and his staff talk to us about it all the time. There’s a real keen interest in putting the industry on a firm footing for the future. What people are looking for is certainty about what the future is going to look like, and they’re going to have it in the very near term.

TROT: What would be the larger objectives of OLG when it comes to racing? What role does OLG fit in with other organizations?

BRICKER: We’re charged by government to create a sustainable industry. For lack of better terms, I’ll describe us as the banker. We’re the ones that fund the transfer payment agreements for the tracks. Ultimately I think that taxpayers in the province want to get some kind of a return for that expenditure so a sustainable industry is part of that. We realize that the way to do that is to grow wagering. What we want to make sure we have is a quality product, full fields, and find ways to make the industry grow on the top line. Wagering is up this year and that has to do with a lot of the changes in the industry. We saw that with the standardbred auctions last year. People see that with the budget announcement last year.

What I keep saying to people is that if I had a dollar to spend on a horse right now, I’d do it. Whenever I see a market where there is a shortage of something that is a key input to the business and I have an opportunity to buy into that -- and I know that there is absolutely going to be a program for any horse you buy right now to race into -- it doesn’t really get better than that, but some people don’t really believe it.

TROT: There was an announcement through to 2021. What is going to be next?

BRICKER: I can assure you that there is a program that I’ll call a generational program afterwards, that is designed to sustain the industry at the same kind of levels that we’re doing right now, so that’s our intent. Again, if I was a person thinking about investing in horses, now is a good time to do it.

I can even talk about SARP. The changes that needed to happen are things that should have been done in the industry, but people didn’t have to make hard choices. My sense was that the government had competing priorities and there were all kinds of fiscal responsibilities in the province. Choices were made.

Then other choices were made to say that the horse racing industry is a valuable part of the fabric of the province –- culturally and economically, particularly in the rural part of the province, and something needs to be done. That’s why people stepped in. I came in after that.

I look at that this way: the past is prologue –- it’s all interesting history but it’s not really important for right now. What’s important for now is to take a look at the resources that we have and put together a coherent program that’s going to drive wagering, that’s going to result in people having confidence in breeding horses and create jobs in rural economies and we’re in a position to do that. The program that we’re putting together is to fund tracks and live racing. We continue to fund racing at places where the slots no longer are.

TROT: Will the new plan tie any form of gaming directly to the funding of racing?

BRICKER: No. It’s really about determining how we’re going to drive wagering and this program is about doing that. Who knows what’s going to happen in the gambling environment in the future, and we’ll have to respond and adjust as that happens, but we’re dealing with the facts on the ground right now and this program is designed to deal with that.

The way we’re looking at it is that horse racing is part of the core business of the OLG right now. We’ve been tasked with integrating horse racing into OLG and that’s what we’re doing.

TROT: What types of marketing does OLG see itself engaging in?

BRICKER: We work together with Ontario Racing. You have to take a look at what the Premier said when she talked about the benefits of integrating horse racing into OLG. One of the things she put a premium on was the branding and marketing expertise that the OLG has and we’ve turned that loose on the horse racing business. We’re very actively working with OR (Ontario Racing) to build their brand and they’re very active with us, so we are in tune with what their needs are.

TROT: What have you learned from the market research you’ve done?

BRICKER: People find horse racing very exciting. Many people have been to the track and we know that people are excited that they don’t have to pay for admission and parking and can have a great time. You’ll see a lot of this focus in our future advertising and marketing.

I’ve always heard that the casino customer is different from the horse racing customer but the more people I talk to, you do hear that there is a lot of cross fertilization between the two. One family member may go to the slots while another might go to the races.

TROT: How do you see the management of horse racing to ensure success?

BRICKER: Over the long term, what we’re looking to do is have the industry manage itself. What I would prefer to do is instead of micromanaging things that other people know better about, we establish some metrics that we agree to, that align with the objectives the province has – growing wagering which is a primary, jobs, and I talk about this thing all the time called race quality. I want to re-establish the link between purse levels and wagering levels. The thing that people are going to be best served by, particularly horsemen, is to have a competitive, interesting growing business to race into.

TROT: Will the plan be agile enough to adjust to future change?

BRICKER: Right now, we have to lock down what the program is going to be, get everyone agreed to it, and start implementing it.

We’re going to do an annual business plan. You can’t nail something down for 10 or 20 years and say we’re not able to veer from this. The idea is to be agile and responsive and ultimately become the premier horse racing destination in North America if we can do it. A lot of people are looking at what we’re doing because we’re doing some interesting stuff.

People are going to see that we’re actually putting into place a program that we’re serious about that’s going to create far more certainty for people than they’ve seen for a while. I’m pretty excited about it. I look at it as a business like any other and there are assets here and if people can look at us as an industry, they’d see that we’re headed in the right direction.

TROT: Who holds OLG accountable on the horse racing side from government?

BRICKER: It’s directly the Minister of Finance but obviously there are other stakeholders politically. The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs is interested. The Premier’s Office is interested in it.

TROT: Do you believe everybody in the industry is pulling in the same direction?

BRICKER: I’d be naive if I said that everybody was totally aligned and when we come out with our new program there’s going to be a ticker tape parade. There will always be the people who say that we should just put SARP back into place again, and that things will never be like that again. They’re right, they won’t be, but I think we have an interesting future ahead and the industry is part of it.

Track consolidation is a touchy subject. My view is that every track goes into the new program and then the industry has to decide what it wants to do. I don’t think you look to government for those decisions. The industry are the experts. They know what we’re trying to achieve and we’re going to rely on their advice.

TROT: What is the key message you want people to know?

BRICKER: I want people to get the signal that there is going to be a future. If you were thinking of investing in a horse, now is the time to do it. If you just look at the basic economics of supply and demand, there’s never been a better time.