Paul Willcocks - Vancouver Sun - Saturday, March 06, 2004
VICTORIA - So why don't you play Keno? the nice researcher asks on the telephone.
Too complicated? Or would you feel like a loser sitting in a bar, eyes darting from scoreboard to little scribbled entry form?
Both, really. I have never been able to figure Keno out. And I would feel like a loser playing a clunky substitution for a VLT, especially one that I didn't understand.
The B.C. Lottery Corp. called me up -- as a typical consumer -- to find out why people weren't playing Keno and what I thought of other gambling and their ads. It's the kind of research that made the Crown corporation the 2003 B.C. Marketer of the Year.
On a professional level, way to go.
But shouldn't it creep us all out a bit that the best marketers in the whole province are trying to persuade gullible or desperate people to lose money on long-shot gambling?
The B.C. Lottery Corp. has an 18-person marketing department for lotteries alone, and a hot ad agency. It spends more than $10 million a year to persuade people to buy all those scratch-and-win tickets and play Keno while they drink beer. There are separate marketing efforts for casinos and bingo.
The B.C. Lottery Corp. has a monopoly on legal gambling. So when the corporation spends money on advertising, it's to persuade new people to start gambling, or current bettors to spend more.
It's working. The Crown corporation just posted its 28th straight record year. We pumped $3.2 billion into slot machines last year -- $1,000 for every adult.
That wasn't enough for government, though. This year about 1.9 million of us -- 59 per cent of adults -- gambled with the lottery corporation in an average month.
The Crown corporation's business plan calls for increasing that to 65 per cent over the next four years, thanks to clever marketing and seductive games. That's another 190,000 people persuaded that gambling is a smart, fun thing to do.
It's a choice for most of them. But based on government statistics, the corporation will create another 7,600 problem gamblers, people whose lives will be seriously messed up by a gambling addiction.
Families will be destroyed, jobs lost, loan sharks made rich. (Every four days in Canada last year someone killed themselves as a result of gambling problems. B.C. was the only province surveyed not tracking gambling-related deaths.)
When the Liberals took over, gambling netted $562 million for the government. They've cranked that up to $850 million this year -- a 50-per-cent increase in three years. They want to crack the $1-billion gambling profit ceiling in two years, making gambling worth about as much to government as the forest industry.
Not bad for a party that campaigned on a promise to "Stop the expansion of gambling that has increased gambling addiction and put new strains on families."
Instead of stopping the expansion, the Liberals went wild. There were 2,400 slots in 10 casinos when they were elected. By the end of this year, the Liberals will have doubled the number of slot machines.
Their main justification is that they were forced, unwillingly, to expand gambling.
The NDP may have indicated to some casino operators, sometime, that they could someday have slots, the Liberals say. Stopping the expansion would break these vague promises, and the province might get sued. It's rubbish, particularly from a government that has happily ripped up real agreements.
And it certainly doesn't explain the newest plan to place slots around the province in "community gaming entertainment centres." It sounds kind of like a cross between a video arcade and a rec centre.
In reality, the new name just means that bingo halls -- from Williams Lake to the Vancouver suburbs -- are going to get slots in a bid to create more gamblers.
The Liberals' gambling addiction is understandable. Without the money from expanded gambling, this year's budget would have shown a $200-million deficit, not a surplus.
But their easy abandonment of what once were touted as important principles is the kind of expedience that breeds cynicism.
willcocks@ultranet.ca
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