Friday evening’s first race at Saskatoon’s Marquis Downs results in a photo finish. Above the grandstand, in a little pink room, a photographer processes the film in less than a minute and sends the photo by vacuum tube to the race stewards one floor below.
It’s just one of the many services brought to you by the friendly folks at Agriculture Canada.
That’s right. The Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency, a special operating unit of Agriculture Canada, is there to protect the public against fraudulent practices at racetracks, supervising everything from the photo finish to urine samples.
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How Agriculture Canada ended up with this portfolio is a bit of a mystery.
“That’s a real good question,” said Thane Bell, director of operations of the CPMA. “I don’t know the answer.”
What he does know is that this has been under the minister of agriculture’s umbrella since 1920. For the first 50 years, racetracks were federally supervised for the department of agriculture by the RCMP. In 1971, Agriculture Canada established the racetrack division (which became the CPMS in 1992), hiring many of the RCMP officers it had previously employed under contract.
Bell can only speculate, but he believes the link to Agriculture Canada stems back to racing’s roots in agricultural fairs. He believes department officials, who were at the fairs judging things like the biggest pumpkin, were also called upon to monitor the races.
These days his crew of 50 full-time and 60 part-time officials are responsible for on-track testing of all computerized betting systems and for auditing betting and the calculation of pay-out prices. The CPMA contracts out the photo finish, video race patrol and drug testing service.
The agency is funded by a levy of .8 cents on every dollar bet on horse racing in Canada.
Provincial governments also get their cut. In Saskatchewan that piece of pie amounts to 10 percent. The track’s commission depends on the betting pool, ranging from seven percent for the win/place/show pool to 19.2 percent for triactors.
The remainder is returned to the public, who last year wagered $1.8 billion at Canada’s 118 tracks. The CPMA’s levy was collected on only $1.6 billion of the gross bet since about $200 million was wagered on American events that do not fall under the levy.
