By Arthur Weinreb
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Lotteries throughout Canada are coming under fire. It began in Ontario after the CBC's The Fifth Estate reported that owners and employees of retail stores that sell tickets claimed about 200 times the number of wins that ordinary patrons did.
Last week this scandal had spread to Atlantic Canada. Retailers were found to have won 10 times the amount that statistics estimated that they should have won. A spokesman for the Moncton N.B. Atlantic Lottery Corp. said that 25 wins of $25,000 or more are now under investigation. Investigations are also underway in B.C.
The president of the Consumer Association of Canada, Bruce Cran, is calling for the RCMP to probe the high amount of wins by lottery retailers. Cran said, "They shouldn't be allowed to buy tickets at all. It isn't the be-all and end-all to stopping these thefts, but it certainly would make it a little more difficult, and would be helpful to consumers in buying lottery tickets." That statement was a nice and simple and at a least partial solution to the problem, but it would likely take years for a government to not only come up with that idea, but begin to implement it.
Ontario's government run lottery corporation, the OLG, has come under fire for reasons other than for improper and fraudulent payouts. Formerly known as OLGC, the government spent $6 million of taxpayers' hard earned money to drop the dreaded "C" from the company's moniker; for reasons none of us are really clear about. It's a safe bet that no one other than a few government bureaucrats with way too much time on their hands really understands why OLGC just had to change its name to plain old OLG. This change was nothing less than a shameful gouging of Ontarians.
Back in the olden days, when federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty not only held the same position with Ontario but was actually a conservative, he espoused the theory if something could be advertised in the Yellow Pages the government shouldn't be doing it. But Flaherty is gone; not only to Ottawa but to the other side and there is no one around who will argue that Ontario should get out of the lottery business. Current Ontario PC leader John Tory's solution to the problems of OLGC -C is to throw good money after bad and conduct a forensic audit. And then what? Well, the lottery will go back to business as usual. At least those Ontarians that don't handle change well can take comfort in the fact that their government will be blowing big bucks on lotteries no matter who wins the next provincial election.
Moves are underway south of the border to privatize state run lotteries, albeit for different reasons. Illinois, Indiana and Texas are among the states that are thinking about selling their lotteries in order to bring money to their cash starved states. If a state sells or leases their lottery, they get a large infusion of cash upfront, together with yearly royalties. John Filan, the chief operating officer of Illinois said, "This is fundamentally a retail business and governments are not equipped to manage retail businesses. Gaming is getting so competitive around the world that we're worried our revenues could go down unless there is retail expertise to run the lottery."
Ironically, many of those who oppose this privatization reason that if a lottery winds up being run by the private sector, the type of problems that have developed in our government run lotteries will occur.
Problems such as store owners and employees cheating could happen in the private sector too. But governments have no power to remedy the situation in a timely fashion. There will be discussions, debates, likely an investigation by the RCMP who are still investigating the 1985 Air India crash but any meaningful change to the way lotteries are run will be years away. In the meantime, nothing will change. Governments should simply get out of the lottery business and allow it to be run by people who not only know what they are doing but don't have the time to sit around debating whether or not a "C" should be dropped.
Meanwhile, three sex trade workers have launched an application in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, arguing that the bawdy house, living on the avails and communicating for the purposes of prostitution sections under the Criminal Code are unconstitutional. And if they happen to be successful, the government will jump right in to become their pimp. We can hardly wait.
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