You may have noticed that over the last few decades, Ontarians, led by the governments at Queen’s Park, have become obsessed by gambling. The official word for it is ‘gaming,’ as in the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG, the industry’s oversight body), but since that’s also what all of us spend hours playing on our various devices, we’re going to mostly use the traditional term ‘gambling’ in this four-part series.
This first article will provide a basic introduction to the practice. The second will talk about the full breadth of the gambling industry in Ontario – where and how do we gamble, who owns the machinery, and how is it all regulated? The third will talk about the money: what OLG and its partners spend on advertising, what Ontarians spend on gambling, and how the profits are distributed. The fourth will talk about the social impacts of gambling – employment and tourism on one hand, addiction and debt on the other.
What is Gambling?
In the broad sense, we gamble whenever we make a choice, hoping for an uncertain result. Sometimes the ‘odds’ are heavily in our favour. For instance, unless something has gone mysteriously wrong with the truck overnight, if we turn the steering wheel to the right, the vehicle will also turn to the right. We kind of count on it.
Things get a bit more iffy if we’re counting on human behaviour. We take a chance that when we send our darling Petunia off to Grade One, she will have learned how to spell “cat” by next spring; it says so in the curriculum, but we rely on the competence of the teacher, and the ability of Petunia herself, to achieve that desired result.
Similarly, we gamble that when we vote for the Liberals in the federal election, they will in fact be elected, and if they do, they will in fact put into motion that part of their platform that convinced you to vote for them. But this is by no means certain, that’s the lovely but irritating thing about democracy. Life, as they say, is a never-ending gamble.
For the purposes of this series, though, the act of gambling is ‘spiced up’ by the addition of something of material value. It doesn’t have to be money, of course. You and your better half could place a wager on the Liberals’ performance. If they actually institute electoral reform within 18 months of taking office, you will bake her a carrot cake; if not, she will bake you one.
Over the millenia, though (dice have been found beside Stone Age fire pits), the wager has very often taken the form of currency. You bet the farmer next door 50 ducats that your horse and plow can seed 20 acres before his can. You invest 5,000 crowns in a ship exploring the New World, betting that whatever it finds will earn you a knighthood. You sit down at a poker table in Tombstone, hoping your lucky streak starts tonight.
Often, of course, gambling activity is totally unregulated. If you and Fred bet five bucks on tonight’s Jays game, nobody cares but you and Fred. If the bet was $5 million, the range of people who might care is considerably expanded. Or if you place that five dollars in a betting pool that involves thousands of gamblers, and stands to make you a much bigger winner (simultaneously creating a lot more losers), the impacts are similarly bigger.
In some gambling situations, it could be argued that skill has a role in the result. Knowing the right moves in backgammon, playing the odds in blackjack. Having a good “poker face.” But most often, luck or “chance” is the dominant factor. Your chances of winning the big Lotto Max jackpot are now more than 30 million to one. But somebody has to win, right? As the ads say, “it might as well be you.”
The promise of big money is what originally attracted organized crime to gambling, and what prompted governments to take it over in the latter part of the 20th century. We’ll examine the government stake in the industry in a later article. But suffice it to say that over the last half century, the proportion of the province’s revenue derived from gambling has increased exponentially. The Ontario Lottery Corporation was founded in 1975, with the establishment of the first provincial lottery, Wintario. The first national lottery, Lotto 6/49, followed just a couple of years later. In 1994, the Ontario Casino Corporation was created, and the first public casino opened in Windsor. Now, fewer than 30 years later, there are dozens of casinos in the network, many of them privately owned. There is a large variety of lotteries. There is online gambling, organized sports betting. And of course, you can still bet on the ponies, although race tracks all have slot machines as well. It’s all a bit dizzying, so we’ll sort it out for you in the next article in the series.
There’s no doubt that the gambling industry has its benefits. It employs thousands, and brings in millions of tourist dollars. The profits benefit arts groups, hospitals and municipal infrastructure. But there are huge social costs as well. Statistics Canada estimates more than 300,000 of us have a gambling problem, and that’s just those who’ll admit it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pete quit his job as a mechanic to devote himself full-time to online poker; he’s lost a lot of weight, and sleep, since then. Serge and Marie have a retirement plan that includes winning the lottery. It’s complicated, it’s new, and the government is totally committed to it. That’s why we felt it was important to help you understand it.
Conrad Boyce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Uxbridge Cosmos