There is a high-stakes game happening between Premier Doug Ford’s government and the province’s gambling agency.A visibly unhappy Ford said Thursday was calling in auditors to examine the books of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation.“I’ll tell you right now with OLG, we’re sending an auditing team in there,” the premier told reporters.“If there’s one thing I won’t tolerate it’s people wasting taxpayers’ money,” he said.“So once we get the audit done and make sure we’re transparent ... we’ll be talking to (the) media and you can take a look at the audit.”Ford’s gambit appears to be sparked by a series of stories in the Toronto Sun, detailing the spending of OLG’s CEO Stephen Rigby.Rigby, who made $765,406 last year, has been criticized in the paper for lavish office renovations.Appointed by the previous Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne, he served as the national security adviser to former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.In an internal email sent Wednesday to OLG employees, board chair George Cooke said the Sun’s coverage was “sensationalist, misleading, and a distortion of the facts.”Cooke, who also penned a column for the Sun Thursday defending the CEO, praised Rigby in the memo.“In 2014, the then-board of directors of OLG conducted a cross-country search ... and chose an eminently qualified leader to take the helm: a respected public servant with a proven record of leading transformations of large organizations nationally,” he wrote.“Stephen was brought in to modernize the delivery of land-based gaming, and maximize lottery operations. He has done so while generating record returns year over year.”The chair noted that since 2015, “OLG has increased returns to the province from $2 billion to $2.5 billion.”“This unprecedented growth was achieved while OLG was twice awarded the ̶ ...
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