Gambling may be a national infatuation, but in Alberta it’s closer to an obsession: the average Alberta adult spends nearly $1,000 a year gambling, twice the national average.
So it should come as no surprise that the Alberta government is examining the movement to online gambling. Where there is potential revenue — even if it also has the potential to cause untold human misery — the government of Alberta will be casting covetous glances.
Quebec and British Columbia have already mounted online gambling programs (not without some significant hiccups) and Ontario expects to have an online gambling site operating by 2012 that will earn revenues of $100 million within five years. That represents one-quarter of Ontario’s current gambling revenue.
“They do have a lot of bills to pay, as we dread constantly,” Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. chairman Paul Godfrey said last week of his provincial government. “But the fact is, if we’re going to retain Ontarians’ money in Ontario, we better do it now.”
Alberta Deputy Premier Doug Horner said more study will be done before a decision is made here. “I don’t think Albertans want us making decisions on what our gut tells us,” he said.
But the gut instinct, tied as it is to money, usually wins out, as it apparently has in Ontario. The money can provide schools roads and other services — and it is easily plucked.
The underlying issue is that the U.S. ban on online gambling is expected to be lifted this fall. And then all bets are off, in Ontario, Alberta and everywhere else.
Already the pressure has been immense. The B.C. government estimates its populace spends about $100 million at offshore gambling sites and it wants that revenue for education and health care.
In Canada, the provinces have jurisdiction over lotteries and gambling, but the transactions must be made within the province. So Albertans can’t bet on the B.C. government website, for example.
At the same time, Canadian governments have no ability to restrict the average Canadian gambler’s access to foreign sites.
So the money flows out — and provincial governments want it to flow into their coffers.
But at what social cost?
Online gambling sites are difficult to administer and police. B.C.’s site had to be shut down when it was realized that some players were using other people’s money. And there are ongoing issues with access by underage gamblers, other fraud potential, fairness and — worst of all — an acceleration of already severe problems with gambling addictions.
Online gambling allows players to lose money without actually seeing it disappear; the cash in your pocket is not diminishing as you gamble and so the potential to lose a great deal more than you planned on wagering is huge.
And in the virtual world, there are no social checks on your behaviour. You can sit at your computer by the hour and lose money.
Alberta Health Services warns that teenagers are drawn “to video lottery terminals for the same reasons they’re attracted to video games.” Certainly the leap to online gambling can be made just as easily for teenagers. The department claims 62.6 per cent of the students polled in a recent survey said they gambled in some fashion.
“The earlier an individual begins to gamble, the more at-risk he or she is of developing a gambling problem later in life,” says Alberta Health Services.
Online gambling is sinking deep roots and reaching a younger audience. And there is no way to turn it off. If Alberta must introduce online gaming, it must learn from the mistakes elsewhere, and it must be aware of how necessary it is to make the sites as unambiguous as possible.
What’s required, then, is greater online site management and control, from age restrictions to pattern tracking.
The relationship between the activity and the financial cost must be clear to every online gambler. The site must make it clear to the player how long he or she has been playing, how many hours — and dollars — they have spent in a given week, and if their betting patterns have changed.
And we need to be prepared, as a society, to redirect more of the millions of dollars in gambling revenue right back into counselling problem gamblers, because the cost of our provincial obsession will continue to rise.
John Stewart is the Advocate’s managing editor.