Media Clipping — Thursday June.26th, 2008, The Chronicle Herald

Lead Editorial

Is gambling good for us?

THE Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation wants to feel the love.

For an undisclosed amount of taxpayers’ money, the province’s gambling czars plan to spruce up their image over the next three years. How? By telling Nova Scotians how those millions of dollars lost every year by gamblers help fund important government programs. And also by letting people know that Nova Scotia is considered a worldwide leader in providing programs for problem gamblers.

To be fair, the government has taken steps over the last three years to slow down and reduce the number of VLTs, beef up programs for prevention and addiction, and conduct research into ways to address problem gambling.

The rub, of course, is that government itself runs the gambling operations that create the need for those prevention and addiction programs in the first place.

The branding exercise will no doubt tell us that $162 million in gambling revenues, coming from people losing money at video lottery terminals (VLTS), casinos or through buying lottery tickets, went into the province’s coffers in 2006-2007. We’ll also hear how that money was used for roads, education, health care and to deal with problem gambling.

What we’d like to hear, however, is how government can continue to justify raking in millions of dollars through a regressive system – designed to ensure players lose more than they win – that derives disproportionate profits from the lowest wage earners among us.

We’d also like to know how much of a real impact the $7.8 million now spent on responsible-gambling initiatives actually has in terms of helping an estimated 15,000 problem gamblers in Nova Scotia. We’d like to know about the government’s efforts to deal with the bankruptcies, family breakdowns, depression and even suicides that have been documented among problem gamblers in countless studies.

Some experts suggest the ill effects of gambling – higher costs for justice, social services, health care and through lost productivity – may outweigh government "profit." In 2004, a GPI Atlantic study found problem gamblers and those at risk for problem gambling contributed 40 per cent of the government’s take, while the costs of higher rates of social ills due to gambling – including 6.3 per cent of suicides – were not factored into the balance sheet.

Instead of rationalizing its behaviour, the government should deal with its own addiction to gambling revenues.

Copyright © 2008, The Chronicle Herald