Construction crews at a sprawling south Edmonton site continued working at full pace this week, undeterred by an Alberta judge's decision to grant a judicial review into whether the Camrose Casino is allowed to relocate there at all. The facility, which announced its move years ago, has since reached the stage of project completion where stopping would be more expensive than simply hoping the courts agree.
"We have enormous respect for the legal process," said a spokesperson, gesturing at a half-finished building that already has a name, a logo, and a planned slot-machine layout. "That respect is why we've decided to keep building it. It would be disrespectful to the judge to leave a half-poured foundation just sitting there unresolved."
City officials, who have spent the better part of a decade watching the project advance through a sequence of approvals, reversals, and approvals of the reversals, expressed cautious confidence that the matter would be settled before or shortly after the grand opening. "The beautiful thing about a judicial review," one planner explained, "is that it reviews the decision, not the drywall. The drywall is already up. The drywall has moved on."
Residents of Camrose, meanwhile, were left to contemplate the loss of a casino that had not yet successfully arrived anywhere else, a unique civic limbo in which a building can simultaneously be leaving one town and not legally permitted to enter another. "It's like a divorce where neither person is allowed to move out," said one local. "Except one of them is a 60,000-square-foot gaming floor."
The casino's operators remained optimistic, noting that uncertainty is, in many ways, the core product they sell. "Will the relocation be approved? Will the review go our way? Nobody knows," the spokesperson said brightly. "Frankly, the suspense is exactly the experience we offer inside the building. We're just providing it early, and for free, to the entire municipal court system."
At press time, contractors had begun installing the casino's signage, on the reasoning that a sign is technically not a building and therefore probably falls under a different review entirely.