From the Gazette on Friday, February 5, 2010:
MONTREAL -- Anyone who is close to one of Quebec's 35,000 to 56,000 problem gamblers will not be happy to learn that Loto-Québec is heading into online gambling.
Cabinet approval for the new venture was announced this week, and Loto-Québec said it will launch its site in the fall, operating with the Atlantic and British Columbia Lottery Corporations.
For gambling addicts this could be a recipe for disaster. Imagine problem gamblers playing not in a casino or at a VLT in a neighbourhood bar, but online at home, perhaps with nobody nearby to persuade them to stop.
From a broader perspective, however - the one Loto-Québec takes, and which we share, with reservations - it makes sense for the province to compete with the sometimes-obscure private interests in this lucrative field.
Loto-Québec's profits end up in the provincial treasury, after all. And a lot of money is at stake: With a yearly take of about $4 billion, Loto-Québec already feeds $1.3 billion a year into government coffers. The online venture is expected to bring in another $50 million a year by 2012.
What a coincidence that this is just the same amount Quebec must pay in damages in a 2001 class-action suit brought against Loto-Québec by nearly 120,000 gamblers, over the cost of addiction treatment.
Gambling is one of those social phenomena that government cannot stamp out, and should therefore try to manage as sensibly as possible. Loto-Québec's policy for years has been to avoid increasing opportunities to gamble. But now that Internet gambling has vastly increased those opportunities, we can accept that it makes sense for the government to try to muscle private suppliers, who might go untaxed and unregulated, out of the market.
But Loto-Québec will clearly have a grave responsibility to make online gambling somewhat less dangerous for the most vulnerable.
What will Loto-Québec do, for example, to keep under-age people - and not just Quebecers - off its site? Will players be given ways to set a maximum they can lose per session, or per month? Will sessions be cut off after, say, four consecutive hours? And what new ways will the company and the Quebec government find to help those whose finances and families may suffer greatly from gambling addiction?
This move makes sense, but only with lots of safeguards and support for problem gamblers.
