BC Business
BC gambling
With the steady expansion of gambling in B.C., the trick is knowing where to draw the line. The B.C. Lottery Corp. has some good advice for gamblers: know your limit. It’s easy advice for most players to follow, just a matter of defining a threshold for loss. But what if you couldn’t lose? Then it gets pretty hard to know your limit, and even harder to play within it. That’s the situation the B.C. government has faced over the past 37 years as commercial gambling has expanded steadily in B.C. ?
The B.C. Lottery Corp. has some good advice for gamblers: know your limit. It’s easy advice for most players to follow, just a matter of defining a threshold for loss. But what if you couldn’t lose? Then it gets pretty hard to know your limit, and even harder to play within it. That’s the situation the B.C. government has faced over the past 37 years as commercial gambling has expanded steadily in B.C.
Historically, governments in Canada have been granted social licence to control the gambling and alcohol industries under the pretense that citizens need protection from vice. Remnants of that quaint sentiment were still in evidence as recently as 2001, when an election pamphlet vowed that “a BC Liberal government will stop the expansion of gambling that has increased gambling addiction and put new strains on families.” The provincial government’s revenues from gambling have nearly doubled since then, and any suggestion of limits has evaporated with the government’s expansion into online gambling last summer, and with the prospect of a “world-class” casino in downtown Vancouver further enriching the coffers of the BCLC.
So how much is enough? When is it time for government to step aside and hand the reins over to private industry? History suggests that when profit overtakes citizen protection as the primary justification for government control, government may have lost the social licence justifying its monopoly.
Government-sanctioned gambling in Canada came into being in 1969 as part of an omnibus bill called The Criminal Law Amendment Act, introduced as Bill C-150 by then Minister of Justice Pierre Trudeau. Attitudes toward gambling were not as permissive then as they are today (eight out of 10 British Columbians now play, according to the 2010 BCLC Gaming Watch Report by Research and Incite Consultants); people accepted government control as a tempering force. According to Suzanne Morton, an author and historian who has studied the relationship between the legalization of gambling and policies that directed the proceeds toward charities and non-profits, part of the deal was that vice would fund virtue. “The idea was to have a government monopoly on it so it could be operated in a controlled way that benefited the public good,” Morton recently told BCBusiness.
The public good, however, has become an increasingly slippery concept. Morton notes that lotteries have always served to fill budgetary gaps, pointing out that the first legal lottery in Canada was operated by the federal government to fund the 1976 Olympics. It should be no surprise, then, that the BCLC’s record-breaking $1.09-billion profit in 2008-09 corresponded with a projected record-breaking provincial deficit. If it were entirely up to sitting politicians, it seems, the “public good” would mean patching up threadbare budgets. Predictably, though, political aspirants see things differently.
John Horgan, for instance, made his opposition to the expansion of gambling a fist-pounding issue in his bid for the provincial NDP leadership this spring. He thinks gambling derives its legitimacy from the specific programs and organizations it supports through the BCLC’s Community Gaming Grants. “When gambling expanded at the end of the 1990s, the social licence that we had was that revenue from gambling would go toward the arts, it would go toward not-for-profits, it would go toward sports groups and so on,” he points out. “That was the justification.”
Morton notes that government control of alcohol in Canada began in much the same way: “in many provinces they set up alcohol commissions to fund some of the first old age pension plans. Gambling followed that model, based on the justification that individuals shouldn’t benefit from vice, but society can.” The only pensions the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch funds now are those enjoyed by the members of its powerful union.
Horgan plants his moral flag at the border between online and offline gambling: “I don’t have a problem with people going to their local casinos for some entertainment . . . but I have a big problem with people sitting in their basements on their computers losing money that they can’t afford to lose with the blessing of the government. That’s just plain wrong.” The anti-Edgewater protestors who lined up to speak at recent public hearings would rather see the line drawn not in cyberspace, but squarely in the geography of downtown Vancouver.
Where the line is ultimately drawn will be determined by the same kind of messy compromise that got the government into the gambling business in the first place. That’s why the next government would be wise to use the Community Gaming Grants to buy themselves some spare social licence.