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Cash-strapped governments are rolling the dice on online gambling, with Ontario joining B.C. and the Maritimes in setting up government-run online sites. Quebec is expected to announce one in September.
With up to $1 billion being bet on offshore Internet sites by Canadians, provincial governments want a piece of the pie.
Their justification is that they can aid charities, warn people on their sites about gambling addictions and, of course, pad government coffers.
The arguments in favour of state-sanctioned online gambling include the defensible position that it is better to have people lose their money at home to accountable governments that can use that money for the public good, rather than to some murky private company that only cares about its own profit.
Yet there is a much stronger ethical reason why governments should stay out of the online casino business. Once governments embrace online gambling, they sanction and legitimize one of the most problematic forms of gambling addiction.
Roughly one in five Internet gamblers have a problem — a rate three to four times higher than “land-based” gaming, according to a 2009 study by the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre.
The risk of problem gambling among people who gamble on the Internet is 37.9 per cent compared to 7.7 per cent for non-Internet gamblers.
Available 24 hours a day, with nobody to monitor intoxication levels or if the kids are using mom and dad’s credit card, online gambling is inherently more dangerous than VLTs, the so-called “crack cocaine” of gambling. Age verification systems notwithstanding, there are too many issues at stake for governments to ignore. This is not like the lottery ticket business.
According to Garry Smith, research co-ordinator for the Alberta Gambling Research Institute at the University of Alberta, “There’s potential in it for an increase in problem gambling, potential for the increase in youth gambling. It’s very hard to supervise people. They can do it at home. There’s no precautions out there. It would be difficult to stop money laundering using it, and (it) might just increase people’s overall gambling rate.”
People who might never otherwise visit an online site for reasons of security might be far more willing to go on a government site. If the government says it’s OK, it must be fine.
Alberta should avoid going down this road.
Alberta has the second-highest proportion of problem gamblers in Canada (2.2 per cent of the population), the third-highest proportion of moderate problem gamblers (1.7 per cent) and is average in the proportion of severe problem gamblers (0.4 per cent) compared to other provinces, according to a study by the Canadian Psychiatric Association.
This small percentage of the population generates 41 per cent of all gambling revenue, according to a University of Lethbridge study.
For a government to potentially take even more money from addictive people in the uncontrolled online environment is a game it should not play.