OLG offering Ontario residents free chance to win $1 million
The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Cooperation is launching a free contest that will allow every Ontario adult a chance to win $1 million.
On its website, the OLG said the Welcome to Wintario Contest was launched in celebration of its 50th anniversary.
'As a 'thank you' for playing with us over the past 50 years, we're turning Ontario into Wintario,' the contest details read.
'OLG's impact in communities across the province over the past 50 years wouldn't have been possible without you, our players! Now, let's make another millionaire through the Welcome to Wintario Contest!'
The contest offers one grand prize of $1 million and 50 secondary prizes of $1,000.
To enter, residents must sign up for or log in to their Winner's Edge account. There is a limit of one entry and prize per person.
Participants mut be a resident of Ontario and must be 18 years of age or older.
The contest runs from Aug. 18 until October 19, 2025.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CTV News
35 minutes ago
- CTV News
Dog and cat stunt show wows crowd in Cambridge
A dog and a cat share a bicycle at an Ultimutts Stunt Dog Show appearance in Cambridge, Ont. on Aug. 20, 2025. (Dan Lauckner/CTV News) From skateboard tricks to scooter rides, a group of talented dogs and cats put on a show for a crowd in Cambridge on Wednesday. Ultimutts Stunt Dog Show appeared in Preston's Central Park as part of Cambridge Summer Live, a free outdoor entertainment series. The group features specially trained animals who can walk on tightropes, perform handstands and even slam dunk a basketball. Some of them have been featured in movies and television shows, such as Pet Sematary and Titans. 'Most of our 4-legged stars were rescued as unwanted pets, five of the stars are disabled superstars! They are now very loved, live in our homes and sleep in our beds!' the Ultimutts' website reads. 'There are three deaf dogs and one deaf cat,' Melissa Millett, Ultimutts founder and head trainer, told CTV News. 'I started this when I started my dog training school, completely by accident. We wanted to promote the school, we did a show to promote the school and an agent called on the first day.' Dog Ultimutts Stunt Dog Show A dog balances on a trainer's feet during an Ultimutts Stunt Dog Show in Cambridge, Ont. on Aug. 20, 2025. (Dan Lauckner/CTV News) They say the animals are trained exclusively with positive reinforcement and love 'the mental stimulation of having a job.' Although their performance in Cambridge has wrapped up, they have a full schedule through the rest of the summer and fall. They'll be appearing at Toronto's International Buskerfest from Aug. 29 to Sept. 1 and they'll be back in our area of the Ancaster Fair from Sept. 19 until Sept. 21 and the Rockton Fair on Oct. 12.
CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
Matt Mays marks 20 years of Shore Club shows in a special way
Fans lucky enough to snag tickets are gearing up for a big weekend in Hubbards, N.S. as Canadian rocker Matt Mays returns for an extra-special run of summer shows. 'We as a band work on nothing but magic,' Mays said. 'So a place like the Shore Club, we're just very drawn to.' ADVERTISEMENT The three-night series - called the Sundown Salut - celebrates two decades of Mays performing at the historic Shore Club. But this year, the milestone comes with a twist: the stage is moving outside. 'The first time I was in Hubbards was to see Matt Minglewood on the beach,' he said. 'It was crazy, so fun, and I was like - can we do the Minglewood thing? He's the king, right?' Instead of playing inside the intimate dance hall, Mays and his band will set up in a field next to the venue, with the stage facing up toward the hill and the ocean at their backs. Organizers expect about 2,000 people each night. The Shore Club, known as 'Canada's last great dance hall,' has hosted generations of concerts and lobster suppers over its 80-year history. Ahead of the sold-out shows, Mays has been rehearsing with his band at Sonic Temple's new recording space in Indian Harbour, N.S. He says fans can expect a mix of favourites - like Cocaine Cowgirl -alongside brand new material. 'I have an album that's pretty much done,' he said. 'So we're just getting the new ones kind of tightened up too, which is fun.' For Mays, the annual Shore Club shows have become as much about the crowd as the music. 'It's the people that make the shows good,' said Mays. 'We just play the songs, but the reaction we get back - that's what makes up this whole legendary Shore Club weekend.' The Sundown Salut runs Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, with all shows sold out.
CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
Randy Bachman's guitar was stolen 45 years ago in Toronto. He just found it in Tokyo
Jordan Cunningham has the story of how Canadian musician Randy Bachman found his stolen guitar 45 years later. Most of Randy Bachman's guitars – over 400 at last count – are today safe inside the climate-controlled rooms of museums and memorabilia collections. But the guitar he really loves? The one he so cherishes that he would chain it to the toilet of his hotel room at night? Well, that one disappeared 45 years ago from a Toronto-area Holiday Inn, never to resurface again. That is, until now. ADVERTISEMENT The guitar was lost in 1976, when the former Guess Who guitarist, who had by then penned such hits as 'American Woman,' 'These Eyes,' and 'No Sugar Tonight,' was recording his sixth album with Bachman-Turner Overdrive. 'I would carry that guitar with me and put it in the bathroom next to the toilet, then wind a tow-truck chain through the handle and around the toilet twice, and put two locks on it,' Bachman recalled this week from his home in Sidney, B.C. 'So if anyone was going to steal it, they'd have to be a plumber, or rip the toilet out of the wall.' But after the band's final night in the studio, this security protocol failed him. Bachman handed his prized late-1950s Gretsch archtop — the one he bought with paper-route money when he was 20 years old — to his road manager before the long drive back to Winnipeg. 'I said, 'Don't let it out of your sight,'' Bachman recalled. 'He goes to the Holiday Inn, puts it in the room, goes to check out at the desk and four minutes later, or five minutes later, after checking out, it's gone.' For nearly half a century, it stayed gone. 'I GO INSANE' The disappearance triggered a decades-long search. Bachman enlisted the help of the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police and vintage instrument dealers across Canada and the United States. It also triggered what Bachman now recognizes as a mid-life crisis. The 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins model, in western orange, is considered the Holy Grail by some connoisseurs of the brand. To count Bachman among them would be an understatement. The Canadian music icon would go on to buy a dozen orange 6120s of the era, all of them perfectly alike to the unobsessed ear. But to Bachman, they were each a reminder of what he'd had, and lost. Bachman Lookin' Out for Number 1 Randy Bachman with his 1957 Gretsch guitar in the video for "Lookin' Out for Number 1" in 1975. The guitar was stolen from Toronto the following year. 'So I enter my midlife crisis with this on my mind and I buy every Gretsch that gets offered to me,' he says. 'I end up with 385 Gretsch guitars. I go insane.' Bachman amassed such a collection that when the Gretsch family wrested back control of the company in the late 1980s, with a view to restarting production on its classic models again, they came to Bachman for help. His Gretsch collection, by then the largest and most complete in the world, would provide the templates for the old models — as what remained of the early Gretsch prototypes had long since been destroyed in a pair of disastrous factory fires. And so the company borrowed his guitars, five or six at a time, and meticulously copied every detail. 'Every Gretsch that you see today, at any store or anybody playing, is a copy of one that was in my collection,' Bachman says. Three years later, the company was firmly back on its feet and owner Fred Gretsch, the fourth in the family lineage to bear that name, approached Bachman to buy his guitars and establish an official Gretsch museum collection. 'LIKE AN ELECTRIC SHOCK' Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Stuck at home, Bachman was making YouTube videos with his son, Tal, and his son's partner, KoKo, when he got an email from an old neighbour. 'I found your Gretsch guitar in Tokyo,' the message read. According to Bachman, his neighbour had used some old photographs of the guitar and rejigged some facial-recognition software to identify and detect the unique wood-grain patterns and lines of cracked lacquer along the instrument's body. The neighbour ran scans of this unique profile against every image he could find of an orange 1957 Chet Atkins guitar posted online over the last decade and a half. The high-tech detective work paid off with a hit on an obscure YouTube video that, as of this writing, has been watched fewer than 250 times. The 11-minute clip, posted on Christmas Eve 2019, features a man and a woman playing guitars and singing Japanese songs at a restaurant in Tokyo. The man is a musician named Takeshi, and for the bulk of the video, save for an impromptu kazoo solo on 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree,' he's playing a 1957 Gretsch 6120, the Chet Atkins model, in western orange. A videoconference call was hastily arranged through Takeshi's PR representative. The Japanese pop musician speaks no English and Bachman speaks no Japanese. Luckily, Bachman's soon-to-be daughter-in-law, KoKo, is fluent in both. 'So it was kind of like the United Nations because we're here in my living room and Takeshi is there in Japan with his manager and I say hello and then we stop and [KoKo] translates it into Japanese and then he asks a question and she translates it back,' he says. Takeshi guitar Japanese musician Takeshi bought this Gretsch guitar in Tokyo without knowing it had been stolen from Randy Bachman in 1976. (Takeshi) A few minutes into the call, Takeshi reaches his hand out of the camera's view and pulls into frame the very bone of contention. 'I am absolutely struck right in my chest, like an electric shock,' says Bachman. 'This is my guitar, and it looks one day older than when it was stolen. Whoever had it, loved it and took care of it.' Trouble is, Takeshi loves the guitar too. He isn't about to surrender it on goodwill alone. 'He says to me, 'I really feel special about this guitar. How did you get it?'' Bachman recalls. So Bachman began to tell how, at 20 years old, he entered a Manitoba music shop, his pocket bulging with the $400 he'd accumulated over a lifetime in the domestic service, mowing lawns and shovelling snow. 'I walked into Winnipeg Piano,' Bachman recalls. 'And it spoke to me.' But Takeshi also speaks guitar, and this particular Gretsch has hardly maintained its silence since leaving Canada. 'He says, 'Well, I went into a store in Japan, a vintage guitar store… and it spoke to me.'' In a statement to CTV News, Takeshi says he 'felt it was destiny' when he first saw the guitar in a Tokyo music shop. 'I immediately and impulsively purchased it.' 'YOU HAVE TO FIND ITS SISTER' It's still unclear exactly how, over four and a half decades, the Gretsch made its way from Toronto to Tokyo. Its chain of custody contains only those two definite links. It may, at one point, have run through Texas by way of Nashville, Bachman believes. 'I said, 'Takeshi, when were you born?'' Bachman continues. 'And he said, 'In 1976.' And I said, 'That's when it was stolen.'' It was this appeal from the elder rocker that Bachman believes finally swayed the negotiation in his favour. But no surrender would be signed until a replacement was found. And not just any replacement. According to Bachman, Takeshi told him, 'You have to find its sister.' The Japanese musician had agreed to a trade on the condition that Bachman find him a guitar of the same make, model, colour, condition, year and factory specs. (It had to have the original Bigsby tremolo intact, and the black DeArmond pickups, not the Filtertrons. That was important.) Gretsch made fewer than 40 of the guitars in 1957. Nearly all that have survived in the decades since have been undesirably modified in some way. But after a flurry of phone calls, emails and rumours chased off into the vapour, Bachman hit the jackpot at a rare guitar shop in Ohio. 'The serial number is two digits off from mine,' he says, still marvelling at the find. 'Which means it was made in the same week.' Takeshi says he is 'honoured and proud to be the one who can finally return this stolen guitar to its owner.' So what does it cost to replace a factory-spec 1957 Chet Atkins in near-mint condition? One answer might be that it costs approximately 50 times what you could have got one for at a Winnipeg music shop in 1963. But that estimate doesn't account for the millions you might spend buying up a museum's worth of substitutes instead. In Bachman's case, he also has to factor in the cost of flights to Tokyo. 'We have it all set to go,' he says of the upcoming trip. 'We're just waiting for travel restrictions to ease up so we can go.' And in case you thought he'd be chaining his old guitar to the aircraft toilet for the flight back, there's also the cost of the custom aluminum container that Bachman had built to shepherd his old guitar through airport security and over the ocean home. A kind of case within a case, it's 'about the size of a child's bed,' Bachman says, with wheels on the bottom and handles on the sides reminiscent of a coffin. 'I'm telling you, it weighs a ton.'
