From the News on Thursday, February 4, 2010:

 

NEW GLASGOW – John Dunsworth was casting for a movie in Liverpool – this would be in 1993 or 1994 – just killing time.

A fierce contact bridge player with a bum’s luck in games of chance he, too, scoffed at new video lottery terminals that sprang up by the dozens in the darkest corners of bars and coin laundries across the province.

But on a whim the actor, better known to us as Jim Lahey of the Trailer Park Boys, dropped a bill in one. He played it down to his last dollar and walked away on the final spin to catch the attention of someone on the street.

From inside a holler came, “Come back!”

He’d just won $500. That win, he said with his voice dropping low, came on “the magical swinging bells.”

“You know, that first win was enough to hook me,” he said. But the icing on the cake was that he won another $500 on two other machines on the way back to Halifax.
And, he’d done it in less than an hour of cumulative playing time.

In his time, he’s put all that back and more into the ‘machines,’ he told a crowd at the New Glasgow library last night. Dunsworth was speaking on behalf of Game Over VLTs, a non-profit group dedicated to abolishing VLTs everywhere in Nova Scotia.

Terry Fulmore, also from Game Over VLTs,  called VLTs a “modern mistake.”

Governments are addicted to the revenue brought in by VLTs, they regulate the product and then “spend our money to tell us we’re fine,” he said, referring to government-sponsored responsible gambling advertisements. It all presents a conflict of interest, Fulmore said, one that is destroying the lives of Nova Scotians.

“Government is incapable of making a correct decision on VLTs, because they own them,” he said.

 

By Sean Kelly