VANCOUVER – Casinos in British Columbia are sharpening surveillance and considering stiffer penalties for thousands of problem gamblers who voluntarily ask to be prevented from placing bets – a program that has prompted several lawsuits from gamblers claiming the provincial lottery corporation hasn’t kept up its end of the bargain.
The B.C. Lottery Corp. promised improvements to its voluntary self-exclusion system after independent studies it commissioned were released Thursday.
Even as the research was being conducted, several lawsuits were launched alleging the Crown-owned B.C. Lottery Corp. failed to prevent problem gamblers from losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The studies found roughly one-third of study participants, who signed up to be kept out of the province’s casinos, told researchers they had entered gaming facilities unnoticed, while 65 per cent said they never tried to gamble at a casino while enrolled.
The studies also found detection measures in place aren’t sufficient.
“It doesn’t seem to be extremely difficult for those people who try to enter a casino to successfully enter,” Irwin Cohen, with the BC Centre for Social Responsibility, told a news conference.
The four-year study, described as the first of its kind in Canada, assessed participants’ experience with the program, and found more than 90 per cent would recommend it to others.
About 38 per cent were connected to treatment services as a result of participation.
A second study reviewed how the program worked at casinos in Victoria, Kelowna, New Westminster, Vancouver and Richmond. It found a lack of serious penalties for people who gamble anyway.
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“Right now, there’s really no real consequences,” said Jamie Weibe with the Responsible Gambling Council Centre. “There’s a threat of fines but this generally doesn’t happen.”
Weibe said the only tangible repercussion is withholding someone’s jackpot.
“There was strong feeling among everyone that we talked to that they wanted to see the deterrent penalties have more teeth.”
All but five of the province’s casinos and community gaming centres currently use licence plate recognition technology to identify people in the program, while two are testing use of facial-recognition software.
The research recommended increasing such measures, as well as ID checks, random checks and advertising its success rates to deter gamblers from breaking rules.
It also suggested the corporation implement a sliding scale of penalties, starting with gentle reprimands, then requiring mandatory counselling, and finally kicking gamblers out of the program. About 10 per cent of those studied were considered prolific violators.
President Michael Graydon said the corporation accepts all the recommendations and is already moving to improve the program.
“I want to be clear in stating that these are goals we wholeheartedly share,” he said. “The research demonstrates that there is no single solution to these complex challenges and to suggest that there is would really be simplistic and unrealistic.”
Several lawsuits targeting the self-exclusion program were filed last summer, including a class-action case expecting to involve dozens of plaintiffs.
A suit on behalf Joyce Ross of Delta, B.C., described the woman’s plummet into $331,000 of gambling losses after joining the program in 2007. Court documents claim the 55-year-old repeatedly phoned the casino she most often frequented and asked her photo be circulated to stop her from entering.
“Various staff members … witnessed on countless occasions her post self-exclusion gambling activities, apparently with full knowledge of her self-exclusion and without taking any steps to enforce the self-exclusion,” said her statement of claim.
Neither Ross nor her lawyers were available for comment.
The corporation is seeking to have the class-action lawsuit dismissed. The plaintiffs in that case claim it’s improper for the corporation to deny jackpot prizes to people who joined the program but still managed to gamble.
“These people have found their ways into casinos because they’ve got problem gambling and the BCLC is taking their money when they lose and telling them when they win that they don’t get anything,” said lawyer Paul Bennett, who will argue in October that the case should proceed.
“You’re reaping gambling profits off the very backs of the people who have the gambling problem.”
Some 7,182 people are currently registered in the program, which began in 1999. Gamblers can sign up to be banned from provincial gambling facilities for periods of six months to three years.
In the past four months along, there were 1,700 new sign-ups.
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