The hot-topic issue of “fracking” is making its Hollywood appearance in a new movie called “Promised Land.”

The film, written by Matt Damon and John Krasinski, looks at the social impact of a hydraulic drilling technique called fracking, which is causing heated debates around environmental impacts to farming lands.

In a Reuters report, Matt Damon is quoted as saying, “It wasn’t that we said we wanted to make a movie about fracking as much as we wanted to make a movie about American identity, about real people.

We wanted to make a movie about the country today, where we came from, where we are and where we are headed. The point is that the movie should start a conversation. It’s certainly not a pro-fracking movie, but we didn’t want to tell people what to think.”

So what does the Promised Land movie have to do with casinos, you ask? The OLG, like any oil company, is out to make a profit apparently at all costs (see the abdication of the Slots at Racetracks Program).

These corporations are not concerned with the livelihood of people in the agriculture and related horse systems businesses, nor the social and economic devastation that 29 casinos across the Ontario landscape will have as a present and future cultural and social impediment to the “casino” communities.

As in the Promised Land, farmers are signing away their right of land to oil companies for the almighty dollar, just as municipalities are doing with the OLG casino site selections in their respective communities.

Why? Because the times we in live in are fiscally fragile. Revenues are down, citizen expectations are unsatisfied, and just like the Promised Land farmers, the municipalities are buying into a revenue scheme and buying into a quick-fix economy of scale.

The truth is there is no quick fix. The casino fracking will erode the moral fibre of community, create additional social problems, and prey on the disadvantaged and foster false hope to a quick buck mentality.

Instead, we are being run over by a single-minded, socially-corrupt, economically-crippled system of corporate expectations and political ignorance that are out of sync with what the people want now and in the future.

Dr. Karen Pappin
Greater Sudbury