The Race to the Bottom

Promises are broken. Funding for Gambling Addiction is slashed. Funding for criminal enforcement eliminated. Responsible limits are removed. Taxpayers pick up the tab.

All done while legislators rationalize "Consumer Demand..." or, like Beacon Hill, "Look at all that money going to Connecticut!"

We are all the poorer because we allow the Predators to suck the life out of our communities by a "tax on the stupid."

Lucrative gambling profits beckon and B.C. Liberals grab more of the action


Nine years after the B.C. Liberals took office promising to "stop the expansion of gambling," a survey of some of the milestones in the struggle:

Jan. 16, 2002. Premier Gordon Campbell reminds his ministers of the vow. "Our promise was that we would not expand gambling," he tells an open cabinet meeting. "We ran on that basis because there are lots and lots of horror stories with regard to the social implications and social costs of gambling. I think people will expect us to live up to that."

March 29, 2004. The Liberals have quietly boosted the slot-machine count by 50 per cent and relaxed the restrictions on casino operating hours. Net income has increased by one-third. "I'm not going to say that none of this is expanded gaming because some of it is," minister for gambling Rich Coleman tells the legislature. "The definition of expansion of gaming is anybody's definition who wishes to have one."

Aug. 3, 2004. Coleman allows the B.C. Lottery Corp. to lift the limits on slot machines. Henceforth, the count will be determined by "the numbers the corporation deems appropriate for business reasons and in order to best meet marketplace demand."

July 18, 2005. The re-elected B.C. Liberals expand the sale of lottery tickets to an online service. "This is in response to consumer demand," says the solicitor-general, John Les. "I suspect even the NDP realize that selling the 6/49 tickets online is not an expansion of gaming."

April 1, 2009. On the eve of the election -- and without telling the public -- the Liberals shut down the province's 12-member integrated illegal gaming enforcement team after six years of operations. When investigative journalist Sean Holman breaks the news on his Public Eye Online website later in the year, Coleman says: "Frankly we weren't getting the results we wanted. Our concern was we were just putting good money after bad." The budget for the unit averaged $1 million a year.

June 10, 2009. One of the harshest critics of gambling among the Liberals, Kevin Krueger, is assigned cabinet responsibility for the new roof on BC Place Stadium, a renovation that is tied to a proposed casino-hotel development on the adjacent land.

The Liberals are concerned about soaring costs for the roof. But soon, Krueger gets a call from a well-connected government supporter on behalf of the casino company, saying if the provincial commitment is reduced, the private plans will be scaled back accordingly.

"He felt that it would be beneficial to all concerned if I knew that that could be a deal-breaker." Message received. The Liberals agree to put taxpayers on the hook for half a billion dollars worth of renovations.

When Krueger's role as midwife for a casino becomes public, news reporters recall what he said during his days in Opposition: "Women in B.C. will die because of gambling expansion. Children may die and their blood will be on the heads of the government that expanded gambling and of the MLAs who voted for it."

Aug. 20, 2009. The lottery corporation boosts the weekly limits on online betting from $120 a throw to $1 short of $10,000.

That was then (Rich Coleman, circa 2003): "The highest incidence of problem gambling is in things like Internet gaming -- and those are the things we fight to stamp out."

This is now (Coleman in 2009): "[If] those folks are going to gamble online, we'd prefer that they did it as clients of B.C."

Sept. 1, 2009. The Liberals cut funding for the fight against problem gambling by $2.4 million. They also slash the share of gambling receipts going to charities and non-profits, reneging on a decade-old understanding regarding the use of those revenues.

Jan. 20, 2010. The lottery corporation signs off on its gambling targets for the next three years. Revenues are projected to reach $3 billion, more than double what they were when the Liberals took office. About half of those dollars will come from casinos, a threefold increase in 10 years. The slot-machine count, 2,400 at the end of the NDP era, has soared past 10,000.

March 31, 2010. The lottery corporation finishes the financial year with net revenues of $2.6 billion after returning $600 million in prizes. "Net win," the corporation calls this, in the sense that the amount not distributed in prizes is a win for everyone in B.C., particularly (one has to say) those who don't buy lottery tickets, play slot machines or consume any of the corporation's other chancy products.

Interestingly, while gambling revenues have increased under the Liberals, so has the share of dollars held back from the prize pool. This so-called "tax on the stupid," which was 64 per cent of total revenues in 2001, amounts to 77 per cent today.

July 15, 2010. B.C. becomes the first jurisdiction in North America to offer casino-style Internet gambling with some 75 online games.

British Columbians were already spending $100 million a year on illegal offshore sites, according to minister for the non-expansion of gambling Coleman. So the province decided to grab another piece of the action.