In no time, they'll be hooked - again

RUSSELL WANGERSKY The Telegram (Newfoundland)

Provincial governments love to keep up with the Joneses - and nowhere is that clearer than when revenue is at stake. As soon as video lottery terminals started cropping up in different provinces, everybody seemed to need some of their own. The public rationale was weak at best: evil, organized-crime syndicates were putting illegal, "greymarket" machines in bars - the machines only toted up points, but some nefarious bar owners were given cash for points. So governments across the country had to step in, make things right, and snarfle up a billion-dollar business in the process. Never mind that the machines are tailor-made to hit all the buttons that make problem gamblers tick. Never mind that you now hear the words "VLT addiction" in court as regularly as you hear "drug addiction." There was a dreaded grey market to be dealt with, and heaven forbid you would actually deal with it by arresting and charging the people who were, I don't know, breaking the law.

Next step Get ready: we're about to hear the same argument again. At least one of the country's government lottery agencies is moving quickly into Internet gambling, and you can be sure that the same old argument - "Others are running their own unregulated Internet operations, and we have to get in there and save the consumer!" - is only hours away from being made by every government lottery in the land. And at B.C.'s lottery, it's big, big money. Right now, you have to be a B.C. resident - and your computer has to physically be in B.C. - to have completely unrestricted play with a spending limit of, wait for it, $9,999 a week. That is, by the way, a spending limit of $519,948 a year. And there are lots of ways to spend it.

You can play a new game of Pacific hold 'em every 10 minutes - and you can buy up to five tickets a game, meaning you have the ability to risk $60 an hour, from the first hand at 11:06 a.m. to the last hand at 2:06 a.m. That means $900 a day. Some crack cocaine habits are cheaper, and you can play from the privacy of your kitchen computer, or if you're brave and driven enough, from the office computer, too. But heck: you can play Keno every five minutes, too, at as much as $10 a draw (signing up for as many as 99 draws) - or double the cost with Keno Bonus. You can sign up to have the money withdrawn from your bank account by Interac. Scarier still, you can draw the money down on your credit card. Anyone see where this is headed? Do you know many people who can afford to gamble away half a million dollars a year? Didn't think so.

Yes, there are shady, dangerous sites on the Internet. Yes, there are gambling sites on the Internet where hundreds of people in this province play and where they also lose healthy amounts of money, and where gambling addictions are served up plenty of options every single day of every single year. But that doesn't mean we need our governments to be gambling pimps. Think about it: would a provincial government launch its own Internet porn business to combat Internet porn? That's the kind of "improvement" we just don't need. The government may well say it's not looking at Internet gambling right now, and that the B.C. Lottery experiment is one they are watching, not emulating.