Loto Quebec's Conundrum

Loto Quebec’s online gaming should be roundly condemned

We teach puppies not to dirty up our homes. It strikes us that someone should send a trainer to Loto Quebec to do the same thing.

Gambling addiction has become pandemic in Quebec. We are not suggesting another nanny-state, Prohibitionist, inspector-riddled law to ban it. Adults should be free to make their own choices, even if they are bad ones. But with the millions of dollars Quebec spends in appropriate programs to educate and persuade Quebecers of the dangers of gambling, to make it so accessible is the height of hypocrisy and irresponsibility. What’s worse, it is a misuse of public trust and public funds.

The expression “the left hand doesn’t know what the right one is doing” seems most apt. Our government uses our tax dollars to reduce gambling addiction. And all of a sudden an arm of the government, Loto Quebec, puts gambling in your face on every computer screen. Someone didn’t get a memo.

One of the arguments that Loto Quebec has used to justify this decision is that it must protect people from “illegal” gambling. That just doesn’t fly. If the government is so concerned about illegal gambling and the predators at its edges, then let the government legalize all manner of gambling and regulate it. That is protection. The government should not be the enablers of addiction.

The only thing the government is doing by making its move is to further monopolize the gaming business. If that is the intent then it is better done in public-private partnerships like Nevada does. That would be a far sight better than giving desperate people sitting in front of screens more ammunition for their own self-destruction.

Gaming is a legitimate industry. And a growth one at that as anyone familiar with the stock markets can tell you. But the private sector does it better. It is even better at controlling inveterate gamblers and policing them out of its casinos. Running gaming operations is not the government’s mandate and frankly every time the state tries to compete with the private sector it does so badly.

If an adult wishes to gamble out of free choice that is their business. But it is morally abhorrent for the state to use our tax dollars to entice people to gamble their lives away. Any reasonable person taking a look at what Loto Quebec plans to do to get you online can only come to the same conclusion.

It is repugnant that executives of Loto Quebec will be paid bonuses out of the new revenues sure to be generated by this online temptation while we the taxpayers will have to ante up more money to pay for the extra burdens on our welfare system that are sure to be generated by more bankruptcies, broken families and the wreckage of countless lives. And who will bear the moral accountability at our great gambling big brother?

It is time to reign in Loto Quebec’s territorial imperative that seems to be operating without any restraint of intellectual integrity or compassionate authority.