Alberta’s Gamble with Gambling (The Walrus Magazine)
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/u/register/?ref=society-albertas-gamble-with-gambling
Alberta’s Gamble with Gambling
The “crack cocaine” hooks a senior mandarin—and the provincial treasury
by Andrew Nikiforuk
Before the trial, Raymond Reshke wore his shame like a bad suit. The tall, self-effacing, then-fiftyseven- year-old had, after all, lost “everything you could imagine in life.” The grandfather and churchgoer had financially destroyed friends, squandered at least $500,000, and lost his job as the assistant deputy minister of Alberta Infrastructure, the second most important civil office in the province. After Reshke pleaded guilty to defrauding the provincial government of over $100,000 in January 2004, the crown prosecutor didn’t think those collective losses were punishment enough and successfully argued for more. The judge sentenced Reshke to a nine-month jail term.
Prison didn’t erase Reshke’s sense of remorse, but it did prove a revelation. At “The Fort,” a crowded minimumsecurity jail on the outskirts of Edmonton, the polite former civil servant met other middle-aged white males doing time for a different act of self-destruction: drinking and driving. But the majority of inmates were young aboriginals, many with gambling addictions, a dark problem that Reshke knew intimately. Between working on the cleaning crew, watching black-and-white TV, or just fighting boredom, Reshke listened to their stories and shared his own. “I played video lottery terminals,” he told them, but in Reshke’s case his addiction just happened to be aggressively promoted by his very own employer, the government of Alberta.
