Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem Oct. 12, 2026

Jason discusses Canadian Thanksgiving and the Canadian racing landscape in today's Monday Morning Message. 

A good Monday morning to you all and hope you’re enjoying the holiday here in the States or up north in Canada as it’s Canadian Thanksgiving. I’m actually going to be having Jeff Bratt from Woodbine on the podcast tomorrow, so we’ll be talking a little about Canadian racing on the show this week. 

Woodbine certainly gets a lot of the attention when it comes to Canadian racing as it’s the biggest track in the biggest province. And deservedly so. Over the years, I think it’s been one of the best products in North America. It does seem as though they’re falling victim this season to field size issues more than in previous years, but that’s becoming more and more of an issue every year in North American racing with seemingly no change in sight as the foal crop declines year after year. 

One part of Canada that seems to have a bit more stability these days than the recent past is out in Alberta, where Century Downs and Century Mile are both racing as new facilities and new tracks in the last decade. When Northlands Park shuttered in 2019, Century Mile and Century Downs were quick to take over racing in Alberta and give home to players and horsemen there in Wild Rose Country. 

When Hastings closed at the end of last year over in Vancouver, British Columbia, many of the remaining horses and horsemen did make the move up to Alberta to race on that circuit. As is the case with any track closure, many of the participants who race there will go on somewhere else, but many will just fold up shop and do something else. Hastings had a great history and great community of people who raced and bet there, but fewer horses and less interest led to its closing. 

The supply of horses and the foal crop numbers feel like a ticking time bomb that we’ve been talking about for many years, but so few people actually have viable suggestions on how to increase it. Or at least stop it from shrinking further. Obviously part of it starts with making the game more popular for horseplayers, as increases in handle come increases in money for other things like breeding initiatives. Almost every track is offering record high purses year over year, and still those numbers continue to dwindle on the number of participants. 

I remember 20 years ago when I was first starting to work in racing, at small tracks like River Downs and Portland Meadows. Purses were usually in the $4,000 to $8,000 range. Nobody was getting rich, but it seemed like so many people were getting by and doing all right. Now purses are much higher at so many places, and you see trainers moving into other careers and fewer owners because the costs are so expensive. There were so many little “mom and pop” breeders and owners back then, and it just seems like they’ve gone by the wayside. 

Some of that I’m sure is just cultural change, but if people were able to still make a little money or were still just having a lot of fun, seemingly they’d stay involved. 

Racing’s issues are complex, and I’m never going to pretend like I have the answers, because I’m just spitballing like most people are. These are deep structural seas of change we need to get moving to see real effects. Otherwise, it’s just words on a page, or a Twitter account, or into the ether. 

Have a good week and happy Thanksgiving to our friends up north!