It’s 10:55 a.m. on a Thursday in early November, and I’m on the clockless, windowless main floor of Calgary’s Elbow River Casino watching a woman with a wispy grey braid and seafoam-green sleeves play Lamp of Destiny. Her slot machine is a Genie-emblazoned behemoth with two high-definition video screens (“set against a smooth black surface,” says the manufacturer, “to create a cinematic feel”). The woman pushes a button. Lights flash, music plays, reels spin. She pushes it again. And again. And again. Her body is still. Her face glows golden.
I move along. Dozens of people are hunched at dozens of other machines: Lucky Buddha, Texas Tea, Strike it Rich, Merlin’s Wand, Lotus Land, Sparkling Nightlife, Lucky Ox, Mighty Cash, Buffalo Gold Revolution, Rakin’ Bacon, Money Link, Rising Fortunes. I push through the music and lights, past the green-felt baccarat tables where balding Asian men fiddle with their chips, past the off-track betting room (Wager on the Sport of Kings!), through Jackpot Junction, a battery of slots beneath a giant locomotive smokestack spewing cartoon coins and bills.
None of this is meant for me: I’m not a customer, I’m a volunteer. In five minutes my shift starts in the cage, a locked room with barred windows along the far wall filled with plastic chips and real money, where I’ll be banker and cashier, paying out the table-game players—poker, blackjack, roulette. Instead of spending money, I’ll be funding my 8-year-old daughter’s education. A portion of today’s casino take will go to her school, some $65,000 for field trips, books, cultural shows, an artist in residence, iPads and basketball nets.
Countless Albertans know these shifts, having volunteered for schools, community leagues, environmental groups, even churches. (And only Albertans do: no other province allows “charities”—this includes schools’ parent-fundraising-councils—to conduct casino events.) Experience isn’t necessary. Neither is police clearance. The job is just to count money and pay players, and the cage is ringed with surveillance cameras besides. As my shift starts, I’m handed $1.1-million in chips, lined up in trays, and a neat pile of elastic-band-wrapped blue, purple, green, red and brown bricks of cash totalling $350,000, more than I paid for my house. The main rule, I’m told, is to not congratulate customers. I might be handing them $600, but maybe they started with a thousand.
Today the Elbow River will get busy. On a break I watch a woman in a puffy silver coat play two slots, White Cats and Nouveau Beauties, at once. An older couple slumps at Pirate Ship, in front of the cage, for five hours—he on the button, she with her arm around him. The braided woman stays at Lamp of Destiny until late afternoon. By dinnertime, young couples and middle-aged men in Flames jerseys fill up the slots and card tables. At 7:20 p.m., after pushing just over $230,000 through the bars, I sign out. Six new parents and grandparents arrive for the night shift. So ends another routine chapter in Alberta’s growing addiction to gambling.
No province but Alberta allows charities and schools to conduct casino events.
For Andree Busenius, gambling is all too familiar and still somehow strange. Her 1980s childhood in Edmonton’s Riverbend community was a different universe in gambling terms. “I remember going with my aunt to Klondike Days and her saying, ‘OK, you pick a horse,’ and it’d be, like, $2.50. Never more than that. Santa never bought us lottery tickets. The aunties played cards for nickels. Kids weren’t invited.”
Alberta didn’t get its first lottery until the early 1970s, after the Criminal Code was changed to allow provincial lotteries and sweepstakes. The first permanent casino in Calgary, Cash Casino, opened in 1980; Edmonton got its first the next year. Scratch tickets arrived here in 1981 (the $1 Tic Tac Toe). VLTs were introduced in Alberta in the early 1990s over protests from opposition MLAs. In that same decade, sports gambling became legal here, albeit barely: it was offered only by the province, with options so limited and odds so bad that savvy bettors stuck to illegal bookies. Back then, Andree, like many Albertans, “didn’t even know where the casinos were.”
She was oblivious about gambling until university, when she worked a charity bingo for the Edmonton Rowing Club. “I counted out, like, $135,000 in a shift. What I remember most is being very judgmental. I couldn’t believe how many bingo cards people played at a time. I didn’t understand why they’d spend their money that way. And I was unaware this could ever become a problem. Addiction was about how you were raised, where you were from, whether addiction ran in your family, your education. I’d known people who quit smoking, which reaffirmed my belief—it was about will power and self-control.”
Andree volunteered at more bingos. She went to Las Vegas with friends: “Gambling was something you did on holidays. Our daily budget was $100.”
And then, in her late 20s, Andree was raped. “I did everything I was supposed to do,” she says. “Filed the police report; he went to jail. I did therapy. I thought after a few months I’d be healed.” But trauma and addiction are well acquainted. “After a year, I tried geographic therapy and moved to Red Deer, where a friend introduced me to VLTs. And it was immediate, immediate love.”
Andree moved home; the feeling followed. She found a casino. “The first time I played a slot in Edmonton I lost $400 in six hours,” she says. “But I loved how I felt. I saw people who gambled; they’d just be in that zone. And I thought because I wasn’t putting a substance into my body, I’d be able to control it. After that first night at the Yellowhead Casino, as absurd as it sounds, I felt amazing. For six hours, nothing hurt.”
Next morning the pain returned. Andree went back to the Yellowhead.
This was fall of 2002. Andree began gambling every day, from 10 in the morning until late. Sometimes she won only because the VLTs were shut off at 1:59 a.m. She told herself she wasn’t addicted. No-one knew what she was up to. “Every time my mouth moved, it was a lie,” she says. “I was able to keep family and friends at bay because I’d gone through trauma. I’d say ‘You don’t know what I’m going through; I just need some space and some time.’ ”
Mostly she lost. Andree spent her disability cheques, gave up her car lease, sold her and her parents’ belongings at pawnshops and on eBay. “You can be sitting at dinner beside your great auntie, losing your life savings,” she says. “They wouldn’t have the foggiest idea.” Her gambling lasted until February 2003. After maxing out her mom’s credit card, she got caught. Her parents were devastated. Her mom cried for a day; her dad kept asking, “Do you know how hard we worked for that money?”
Andree went to Gamblers Anonymous (GA), joined the long wait for treatment, struggled for years, avoided driving past casinos, avoided Tim Hortons because of Roll Up the Rim to Win (not unusual for gamblers in recovery). She eventually got a job at an inner-city non-profit, paid her parents back, settled down, got married, had kids, moved to Beaumont. Resumed a normal life.
And then one day in 2007 Andree’s employer asked her to volunteer for a charity casino. The week after her shift she was back at the Yellowhead, as a customer, relapsing.
Almost 10 per cent of Albertans aged 12–17 gamble frequently and are at risk of becoming problem gamblers.
What’s now “Pure Casino Yellowhead” is going strong in a northside industrial park. It has 700 slots, a 24-hour poker room, a high-limit room and a private VIP lounge for an “ultra-luxurious gaming experience.” It hosts comedy, live music, art competitions, a Mother’s Day drag revue. Half of the casino’s table game revenues and 85 per cent of its slot proceeds go to charities. Its website features an interview with the artistic director of Shadow Theatre, whose company “is delighted to be associated with Pure Casino.”
Gamblers in Alberta have more options than ever. The Yellowhead and Elbow River are just two of the province’s 24 casinos, found in every big city. Some are open all hours of the day, at least one of them on Christmas. Five are owned by First Nations. Alberta’s sixth such casino, Bear Hills, will be opened late this year by the Louis Bull Tribe just off the QEII near Maskwacîs.
Inside the province’s casinos are the descendants of a limited VLT trial in the 1990s. Alberta now has some 15,000 VLTs. The machines can be found at another 740 locations in Alberta, in rows of four or eight or a dozen next to bathrooms or kitchen swing doors everywhere from Boston Pizzas to dive bars. Alberta has the second-highest concentration of VLTs in Canada and the highest concentration of casino table games.
What started as one provincial lottery in the 1970s is now nine, with weekly prizes ranging into the tens of millions. These tickets, along with dozens of scratch cards and Sport Select, can be bought at any of Alberta’s 2,856 lottery centres. Our original gambling venues are still thriving. Alberta has 20 bingos, most now offering e-daubers that allow dozens of cards to be played at once. We have four horse tracks; bets can also be placed in special rooms such as the Elbow River Casino’s.
But these are all the old ways. Since October 2020, hundreds of thousands of Albertans have been gambling from the comfort of their living-room couch (or bus seat or office chair) through a Crown-owned online casino, Play Alberta. This “people’s casino” has already expanded to include single-event sports betting, because the US legalized it and Canada followed suit. Play Alberta in 2021 began offering wagers that for the past century had been the sole domain of bookies or Las Vegas.
Today you can gamble on the Oilers from your rinkside seat in Rogers Place. (In the words of one provincial official as Play Alberta was being launched: “Just imagine the excitement of the Labour Day Classic or Battle of Alberta and walking over to a licensed sports betting area to bet on who makes the next touchdown or goal!”) The local industry is worth $3.4-billion annually and employs an estimated 13,000 people. Three-quarters of Albertans say they gamble every year, 40 per cent through multiple methods, e.g., playing the 6/49, visiting a casino and betting on hockey.
This is probably an underestimate. Illegal activities are typically hidden, with Albertans thought to annually gamble at least $378-million offshore. Gambling losses aren’t something people love to talk about. And, even anonymously, people tend to understate their vices; studies of municipal garbage and wastewater show that self-reported rates of alcohol and drug consumption are too low.
Official counts are big enough. In 1973–74 Albertans wagered $110-million on all forms of legal gambling, mostly bingos and lotteries. By 1999–2000, with casinos and VLTs proliferating, Albertans gambled about $13-billion. By 2013 it was $23-billion. Not that long ago the notion of playing high-stakes poker or Lamp of Destiny at a government-owned online casino might have sounded crazy, yet in 2022 Albertans placed $3.6-billion in bets at Play Alberta alone.
Albertans can now play VLTs, casino games or the lottery from home, through a Crown-owned online casino, Play Alberta
There was a time in Alberta when gambling was not sanctioned; our only legal outlets were bingos, raffles and horse races. At the end of the 1960s, Alberta’s then-attorney general, Social Credit MLA Edgar Gerhart, flew to Reno, Nevada, to learn about managing vice. When he returned from the four-day junket, reporters grilled the minister. Had he tried gambling? “Not even 25 cents,” Gerhart replied. Would Alberta be allowing slot machines and casinos? “That option is out,” a ministerial official said.
But by the end of the 1980s the local hospitality and tourism industry was lobbying hard for VLTs, and not just for the province’s growing number of casinos—for bars and restaurants and struggling rural hotels too. Officials from North Dakota (that state already had VLTs) warned our leaders about the harms. The Getty government allowed trials at the Stampede and Klondike Days, then formally launched VLTs across Alberta in 1992. Soon they were everywhere. Albertans were quickly hooked, with one-fifth of VLT users reporting problem gambling. Nine municipalities eventually voted in plebiscites to remove what Maclean’s dubbed “the devil’s television.”
Calgary Catholic Bishop Fred Henry was among the most vocal opponents, both of gambling’s spread and in how the public was endorsing it. In late 1998 he told a conference of Alberta Catholic school trustees he was “mad as hell” that they were allowing schools to generate money off the backs of gamblers, especially through the “scourge” of VLTs. “I have to say I’m amazed that you’re not angry,” Henry said. “You’re assuming that fundraising is normal. It’s not. It’s an aberration. …[It’s] simply downloading the problem on the individual schools and school boards.”
By “problem,” Henry was referring to the Klein government’s spending cuts. The disappearance of funds, particularly during Klein’s first two terms, starved public services and non-profits alike. But Alberta’s policy of handing over a slice of booming casino proceeds to schools and charities began to put VLTs and gambling generally in a sunnier light. Klein also cut income- and corporate taxes, shrinking revenues; more lottery-ticket-buying and poker-playing helped offset this too. Gambling revenues to the province rose sixfold between 1992 and 2001; they went from comprising 1.6 per cent of our budget to 5.4 per cent. Albertans’ gambling activity increased fivefold.
Reticence about gambling dwindled among politicians and the public, and the VLT plebiscites seemed to settle things. Some communities eventually lifted their bans. “We have a huge problem with regard to problem gambling in this province… I consider this a non-partisan issue,” protested St. Albert PC MLA Ken Allred in the legislature in 2011. He called VLTs “the crack cocaine of gambling.” He was ignored. VLTs now rarely appear in Alberta Hansard, except ironically as a metaphor for spending that a politician views as risky or wasteful.
The normalization of VLTs saw “gambling addiction” added to the purview of the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission, to create awareness of rising numbers of bankruptcies, theft from employers and suicides. The province in 1996 created a regulator, the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission (or AGLC, today’s Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis). And 2000 saw the founding of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute (AGRI).
The AGRI was a collaboration of Alberta’s three biggest universities. In a 2017 interview with Fiona Nicoll and Mark R. Johnston for the Journal of Law and Social Policy, AGRI founder Garry J. Smith said alarmed citizens had demanded the centre. “Politicians focus almost exclusively on the revenues and are unaware of the adverse consequences of an activity,” he said. The institute would study gambling “from a public policy and social justice perspective.”
Gambling puts politicians in a conflict of interest, Smith argued—the higher the revenues, the easier their jobs and re-election prospects. “Governments benefit [even] from gambling-related crime,” he said. Take, say, the money launderer at the casino, or a gambler embezzling $500,000 from his employer to feed his habit; both add to government coffers. Ultimately our leaders “disregard the problems created by widespread gambling—or just nibble around the edges to make it look like they’re doing something consequential.”
Smith took issue with the province billing Sport Select as “fun,” when mandatory parlays made the game a sucker’s bet (and “Since when is it fun to steal people’s money?”). But his main concern was VLTs. “It’s obvious [they’re] the most dangerous format. You go into venues and it just seems like the players are zombies… 91 per cent of government gambling revenue comes from [VLTs], and about 75 per cent of problem gamblers say that’s their game of choice.” Our leaders are “taking advantage of vulnerable citizens.”
Our regulator has a similar conflict of interest. “The bureaucrats I dealt with at the AGLC generally recognized the weakness in their oversight regime, but were powerless to do much, because their political masters always call the shots.… It comes down to the provincial treasurer declaring ‘We made $1.4-billion from gambling last year. This year I’m budgeting for $1.5-billion. We need that money, and we need to show annual increases.’ ” Gambling, Smith concluded, “should be run by an independent tribunal that doesn’t profit from gambling.”
Today the AGLC’s paradoxical mandate is to “maintain the integrity of gaming activities while maximizing the financial return [to Albertans]”—akin to a person committing to a healthy diet but also to eating as much as possible. AGLC financial documents far prefer the term “gaming” to “gambling.” Besides being “fun and exciting,” gaming “creates jobs and business growth, spurs private-sector investment, expands consumer choice”—and brings in billions annually to the casino industry, charities and public revenues (2022: $307-million to charities; $1.2-billion to government). The AGLC is “concerned about problem gambling.” But it’s also “continually looking for ways to expand gaming entertainment options.”
To get more of us gaming, the AGLC, under the NDP government, trialled new inducements, including scratch-ticket vending machines in grocery stores. But the big change was Play Alberta. The government-owned online casino was ostensibly intended to “repatriate” funds from illegal gambling, but the projected revenues were so huge that Play Alberta was challenged in court by the Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations for its anticipated unfair competition.
Jason Kenney’s UCP government told the regulator to narrow its oversight and focus more on “maximizing returns.” By mid-2022 the AGLC had cut “over 9,100 pieces of red tape,” a “milestone” 38 per cent reduction in regulations, and was celebrating its Golden Scissors award from a pro-business lobby. Some changes at the AGLC affect alcohol or cannabis (e.g., bars can now deliver cocktails to your home; funeral homes can now sell liquor). Also: VLTs can now be operated 24 hours a day, Edmonton’s and Calgary’s airports can host VLTs (up to 49 each) and schools and other groups can request larger charity-casino takes.
The UCP-era AGLC is overseen by a nine-member board lacking addictions expertise. Chair Len Rhodes is a former UCP candidate and pro-football executive who is paid $148,035 annually to lead the regulator’s meetings. Other members include Wayne Drysdale, a former UCP MLA, Elan Harper, former prime minister Stephen Harper’s sister in law, and Angela Tu Weissenberger, wife of Kenney’s campaign manager.
This modern AGLC runs a loyalty program called Winner’s Edge. VLT users earn points the longer they play, casinogoers get cheaper food or drinks, and everyone can win “amazing” prizes. First-timers get up to $1,000 in “welcome bonuses” plus free sports bets and a $10 credit for every $75 gambled. The AGLC in 2022 spent $13-million on marketing, including on ads parodying Scream and The Shining that disparage offshore gambling and encourage visits to Play Alberta. In contrast, virtually all ads for cigarettes were banned in Canada in 1997 and alcohol ads famously face onerous restrictions, including that they can’t actually show someone drinking a beer.
The province now has 24 casinos, found in every big city, most open all hours of the day.
When Andree first attended Gamblers Anonymous in 2003—dragged by her mother—the meeting was near Edmonton’s Baccarat Casino. As she left the car, Andree made plans to play the VLTs right after GA. But the meeting was a jolt. “I’m expecting everybody to be homeless, pushing shopping carts. That’s the arrogance I had. Then we walk in—and I thought my mom had hired actors. They were regular people… in their 60s, in their 20s, in their 40s. There were card players, VLT players, lottery players, bingo players. GA is one of the smaller fellowships, but there were probably 28 people at a Wednesday night meeting—a good, solid turnout.
“And I just cried for two hours. I just couldn’t believe there were other people like me, I just couldn’t. It was so shocking.”
The AGLC and the Problem Gambling Research Network (PGRN) put Alberta’s rate of problem gambling at 5 per cent. This includes moderate to severe gambling problems and would translate to roughly 160,000 adult Albertans. The PGRN says up to 14 more people are affected directly or indirectly by one problem gambler, through family dysfunction or stress, distraction or theft at work, or health problems, bankruptcy or suicide. And young people are at higher risk. Almost 10 per cent of Albertans aged 12–17, says the PGRN, “gamble frequently and may be at risk of becoming problem gamblers.”
What was once three GA chapters in Alberta in 1990 has become two dozen. At press time 41 local GA meetings were scheduled for the next seven days, in Lethbridge, Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray.
At all of Alberta’s casinos are small, lime-green GameSense booths run by the AGLC and stocked with pamphlets: “Frequent breaks keep gaming fun.” “Chasing losses is like herding guinea pigs.” “It’s true, unicorns aren’t real. But the house advantage is.” Signs warn that VLTs cause hand cramps and that slots farther from the aisle don’t pay out more. The booths—islands of earnestness in a sea of stimuli—don’t stand much of a chance. Even the AGLC admits most gamblers are unaware of the program. And until last year any addict seeking these anti-gambling resources had to visit a casino in person.
Some 8,200 Albertans have signed on to GameSense’s self-exclusion program, where addicts can ban themselves from a casino or race track for from six months to three years. This works as long as a casino staff member recognizes the addict from among thousands of daily visitors and ensures that they leave the premises. Addicts can also just use an app, or head to the bar around the corner from their house to play VLTs. And GameSense doesn’t track what happens when bans end.
Andree relapsed in 2007, a week after being asked to raise money for her non-profit employer by working a casino. That first night, she says, “I spent, like, two grand; I was at the casino until two in the morning. And I remember driving home, 40 minutes, going, ‘You’ve just thrown four years of sobriety right down the toilet.’ But according to my addict brain, ‘I’ll go back tomorrow. I’ll make that money back. And then I’ll stop.’ ”
She and her husband had recently sold their home. The money went into VLTs. For three months her addiction raged—nights of release, days of pain and lies. Finally her husband saw their bank statement. He was horrified. But, says Andree, he was also supportive. “Completely, like amazing, incredible. He has addicts in his family. He understands it’s an illness, a disease, that it’s not about willpower and self-control.”
She went back to GA, this time with her husband. At that meeting Andree told him it would be different; she knew now where to get help. Privately, she knew she wasn’t done. Not truly. A week later she began gambling again. She’d leave for a meeting and end up at a VLT. But “because he had control of the money now, I really had to get creative. So that’s when my wedding rings went to the pawnshop.
“I was so ashamed. I kept thinking ‘I’ll win it back, I’ll win it back, and all will be forgiven. I’ll get the rings back, I’ll get the money back. It’ll all be fine. It’ll all be fine.’ ”
On November 15, 2007, Andree sneaked away and gambled again. “And that night, I attempted suicide—because I would have done anything for my brain to stop being a slot machine. Honestly, that’s what my head had become. Just one non-stop racing thought.”
“I didn’t know any other way to ask for help. My husband found me—and as devastating as the money and finances were, that was 1,000 times worse.” Andree spent five weeks in the psychiatric ward. She did therapy. She stills attends GA today. And she and her husband “didn’t do months of marriage counselling; we did years. There’s no doubt—he’s a saint.”
Andree calls herself a gambler in recovery. Every year, she speaks to thousands of students on behalf of the PGRN, warning them about the easy slide into addiction. Her marriage survives. But back in 2007 “my inner voice or self-loathing or shame just did not allow me to come to him,” Andree says. Her husband, she believes, has never gotten over that.
Casinos manipulate their customers using everything from a lack of clocks and natural light to labyrinthine layouts, plush carpets and endless reward-linked stimuli (even fragrances). It all evokes something like a retreat to the womb, where nothing matters and every need is gratified. VLT manufacturers tweak their machines to be ever more addicting. More bells. More whistles. More tricks to keep your eyes glued to the screen. Everyone is trying to stay ahead of offshore gambling—the casino that can be carried in your pocket. That industry could soon be worth US$217-billion.
Concerns about casinos and VLTs seem quaint compared to phone-embedded temptations. “You can access online gambling 24/7,” says David Hodgins, a University of Calgary psychology professor. “[And] you don’t necessarily have the social effects of being with friends or other people that might limit how much someone gambles.” The AGLC is now taking bids from companies wishing to enter the province’s currently monopolized legal online gambling market. The competition could kill Play Alberta but generate a bigger government take overall. Interested vendors include huge players—BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, DraftKings. None of these make even GameSense’s dubious efforts to deter addicts.
Casinos are a subset of culture. Andree remembers how in the 1980s Wayne Gretzky appeared between Saturday morning cartoons, selling Pro-Stars cereal. Today “the Great One”—and Connor McGregor and other role models—appear in endless ads glamourizing gambling. (Gretzky, opening his favourite gambling app: “With every tap, a new legend is born!”) Casinos now take bets on everything from Donald Trump’s re-election prospects to the papal succession. Andree has to warn students about video game “loot boxes”—North Americans already spend $4.5-billion annually on virtual, in-game gambling.
Nothing about gambling is inevitable. Rules and permissibility vary across the world: BC keeps VLTs out of bars; Alaska bans casinos; Hawaii has no state lottery; Singapore’s “casino entry levies” (US$110/day) deter low-income gamblers. Quebec has tried (but so far failed) to make internet providers block offshore gambling sites. But in Alberta gambling is without shame. Essential hospital services are funded by gambling (the Children’s Hospital Lottery: “Buy tickets, create joy!”). Rural air ambulances depend on the STARS lottery. The Kenney government, during COVID, dangled a $1-million lottery in front of the unvaccinated.
Research by the University of Lethbridge’s Robert Williams shows that no province, on average, gets a larger proportion of its budget from gambling than Alberta. When oil collapses, we can collect more from gambling than from royalties. The think tank Cardus argues that as most of this revenue comes from VLTs, which are “designed to override players’ conscious, rational control,” gambling in Alberta is “a regressive tax on the poor and those struggling with addiction.” The institute wants gambling profits “moved out of general revenues and into a separate fund—preferably one aimed at poverty relief.”
But Garry J. Smith says our elected leaders won’t talk about any of this, because they “don’t want to be seen as trying to defend the indefensible.” They know they’re profiting from gambling. “It’s like being married,” Smith remembers a colleague telling him, “but you’re so ashamed of your spouse that you keep him/her locked in the basement. You don’t want to be seen in public with them…You’re trying to distance yourself from the stigma. Same with state-sponsored gambling.”
On the back wall of the Elbow River Casino cage was a sign that put a rosy spin on things. “Charitable Casino” it said in big, red letters; “Building success through our volunteers.” In a document sent to us before our shift, however, the casino said volunteers might instead feel lucky. “Although this is a fundraiser of considerable magnitude,” it read, “everyone working within the facility [is] here to assist you.” In return for eight hours of unpaid labour from each of nine adults, the casino would “generously” provide unlimited cans of Coke and two plates of Chinese food. (I had dumplings and sweet and sour pork.)
A decade ago, culture minister Lindsay Blackett did acknowledge one cost of Alberta’s charity-casino model. “[My] concern is 980,000 man-hours are used by organizations to staff those casinos,” he said in the legislature. “[Those] 980,000 hours could be utilized in their community or in their own not-for-profit.” But his government changed nothing. The Elbow River can count on volunteers continuing to show up. More charities apply to work casinos than Alberta’s casinos can accommodate. And these thousands of groups include more than schools, arts or sports groups; they are women’s shelters, immigrant advocates, societies for the brain-injured, seniors groups, housing providers for the chronically ill, violence prevention societies, food banks, community leagues, veterans groups, HIV researchers, daycares, mental health associations, public library foundations and addictions treatment centres.
Gambling briefly subsided in Alberta during the pandemic. Casinos were closed by public health order. Some might call this a silver lining of a plague that has so far killed over 5,800 Albertans. But with gambling down, public revenues shrank and the AGLC was disappointed to miss its goals. It resolved to create “opportunities for private sector job creation and business growth,” i.e., in gambling, to “maximize charitable gaming proceeds.”
Edmonton’s Grand Villa Casino—60,000 ft2 of “world-class entertainment” attached to Rogers Place—was among those shut down. But while others closed only as long as they had to, Grand Villa’s owners opted for a longer break. Charities deprived of their pre-scheduled fundraiser at the casino were upset. The Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues said the closure was “causing a lot of instability and insecurity for organizations that really rely on this funding.” The AGLC asked Grand Villa to reopen, then, after it didn’t, pulled 57 VLTs as punishment. In 2022 the AGLC ordered the casino to reopen, and to expand to seven days a week, given casinos have a “responsibility to operate as much as possible.” Including during a pandemic. An AGLC review later reversed the order.
Without casino proceeds, public schools like my daughter’s would make do with less, or increase demands on parents. (Calgary Catholic schools, inspired by former Bishop Henry, reject casino/bingo fundraisers but hold bottle drives and golf tournaments and pressure parents to buy from schools everything from bacon to bedding plants.) Without casino proceeds, civil society in Alberta would be unrecognizable. The alternative in both cases would be to fully fund services from general revenues—which still include gambling proceeds. One estimate is that if we abolished VLTs, Albertans would pay $600 more in taxes every year. We could chance the funding of schools, hospitals and social services to wealthy individuals. Or, as a society, we could just collectively accept less. No field trips, fewer books, netless basketball hoops, longer surgery waits and ambulance waits, overcrowded women’s shelters…
Neither the NDP’s nor the UCP’s platform in 2023 proposed any such changes. Neither used the word “gambling” at all.
Our government is addicted. But as long as citizens keep electing leaders that are happy to fund society on the backs of gamblers, and as long as Albertans like me keep showing up to volunteer, the same might be said for all of us. That we are all addicts.
During my Elbow River Casino shift, neither I nor my fellow volunteers said anything about our own conflict of interest—if indeed anyone else felt one. We talked about the strangeness of someone wanting to play a VLT right after breakfast. How some customers didn’t exactly look like they could afford to be gambling. For how long that couple had sat at Pirate Ship, plugging money into what seemed like a numbing slog, and for how much longer they would play.
Evan Osenton is the editor of Alberta Views. We welcome feedback on Alberta Views articles to letters@albertaviews.ca
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