A few hastily erected signs point the way. Hoping to beat the after-work crowd, my dad and I visited on the first Friday afternoon. Located just off Highway 401 in Pickering (Brock exit), it’s about a 45-minute to 1-hour drive from downtown Toronto, and anywhere from 10-30 minutes from Markham, Ajax, Whitby or Oshawa. “No delays are expected to enter the casino floor during your visit” it reads – which makes me suspicious because I’ve checked it more than a dozen times over four days and I’ve never seen it read anything else. Walk-ups acceptedīut when I visited the Pickering Casino website early in the week, it said reservations weren’t required walk-ups were accepted and patrons could come on a first-come, first-served basis, “occupancy permitting.” At the top of its homepage it lists info about its current capacity – updated, it seems, every 12 hours or so. The Vegas-style Caesars Windsor reopened on July 23 and Orillia’s Casino Rama reopened on July 30. I reported last week on the reopening of Fallsview Casino and Casino Niagara, two of the biggest casinos in the country. In Ontario’s step 3 plan, casinos are able to operate at 50 per cent capacity. I only heard about it because a Twitter friend DM’d me about his opening-day reservation. On Monday, Pickering quietly opened its casino part with very little fanfare. The massive Great Canadian Gaming Corporation property was scheduled to open its first phase in early 2020, but those plans were paused due to the pandemic.

And it will draw customers away from competing establishments like the similar-sized Casino Rama and the much smaller Ajax and Great Blue Heron casinos.

It doesn’t look like much now – there’s not even a sign or much frontage – but the brand new Pickering Casino Resort is going to change gambling in the province.

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