Governments’ addiction to gambling doesn’t sit right
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, July 30, 2007
Traditionalists will argue that gambling is a vice, and a destructive one at that. But even those of us who are reluctant to make moral judgments should be uncomfortable with the way governments exploit, and promote, a potentially addictive behaviour.
A new Statistics Canada report confirms that we live in a gambling nation. Nearly 70 per cent of Canadian households have a member who gambles at least once a year. Here’s the jaw-dropper: All the gambling activity combined — lotteries, video-lottery terminals, casinos — brings in some $13.3 billion to government coffers. That figure is from 2006. In 1992, governments brought in $2.7 billion from state-controlled gambling. In other words, the government’s yearly haul is dramatically increasing.
Clearly, governments are addicted to gambling revenue. The question is, should Canadians be alarmed at this growing dependency? That $13.3 billion pays for a lot of hip replacements, school renovations and highway repairs. But there is an unspoken cost attached to the windfall, namely, the broken homes, lost jobs and suicides that too often are the lot of compulsive gamblers.
continued at http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=94141dc5-9eea-40dc-8137-d2684408d958
