Get 'Em While They're Young

Province says kids free to play bingo
Consultant says few children taking part, game contributes greatly to charities

The Dexter government says it won’t change the rules allowing kids to play bingo for cash.

"We’re not going to revisit it," Premier Darrell Dexter’s press secretary, Jennifer Stewart, said Friday. The premier was unavailable for an interview.

On Thursday, a regular bingo player at the Halifax Forum complained that it seemed like more young children were daubing numbers there, and she said she was worried that could lead to young people developing a gambling addiction.

While video lottery terminals, casinos and lottery tickets are off-limits to anyone under 19, bingos and other charity games and lotteries for non-profit groups have no such age restriction.

A psychologist at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax also said Thursday that young children are at risk of developing an addiction by playing regularly at a young age.

For their part, bingo operators say the issue is not a big concern.

"It’s a minuscule number of children who might play," says Larry Farrell, a bingo consultant and spokesman for the Metro Bingo Association.

The group includes bingo operators in the Halifax area and several other parts of the province.

He said young children playing "might happen the odd time. This lady was saying ‘Here’s all these children playing bingo,’ and that’s just not the case."

He said 99 per cent of the people playing bingo are adults, although at times bingos will hold special charity nights for a group and some young children may want to support it and come down to play with their parents.

"The charity bingos in this province do so much great work for society . . . raising money for food banks and fire trucks and everything else that’s on the go, and this (complaint) gives the impression that we’re trying to drag in young kids and get them addicted early. That’s not the case at all," Farrellsaid.

He said halls can institute a house rule that creates an age limit, and some of them have that in place already.

But he said there haven’t been any real issues that he has heard of.

"If (operators) saw young kids coming in all the time, then the bingo hall would announce right away that the next week there would be an age restriction. I’ve seen some put one in place, not because there was a problem, just to make sure there wasn’t one."

Bernie Walsh, a recovering gambling addict and anti-gambling crusader, said he thinks bingo can be an addictive form of gambling. He said if a child goes three or four times a week, "it would be easy to develop an addiction that would lead them to other forms of gambling."

But he said that someone going occasionally shouldn’t be a problem.

"Once or twice a year, or even once a month, (should be OK)," he said, but he would prefer a legal age limit of 19.

He said it may be too late to set one now that the game has gone so long without one, but "I think any kind of gambling that is open to kids should be scrutinized and maybe the law should be changed."

Spokespeople for the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties said no one was available to comment Friday.