Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Comartin and gentlemen, for your presentation.
The former justice critic is here before our august committee. We have indicated our support for the bill, but I have to say that instinctively as a New Democrat I'm looking for issues and concerns, particularly because of the experience we had, for example, in my province.
Going back to the early nineties in my province, similar arguments were used by the government, with the then Minister of Finance, I think it was, saying that we needed to get into the business of putting gambling machines in bars. There were several handfuls of poker machines on bar desks that were put in by various people, and the warning was that it was the Mafia, organized crime, that was doing this, and we had better get involved because we would do it better. Of course, within two years, there were 800 machines in bars across Newfoundland and Labrador. We had a history, following that, of the vulnerable....
Joe, you talked about problem gamblers, but what was really happening was that the vulnerable were being impoverished. There were suicides associated with this. Some people were spending all their time hanging around these machines.
The culprit here, of course, is the video lottery machine, the so-called crack cocaine of gambling. There has been tremendous debate in my province about it. In Nova Scotia, they had them in grocery stores and convenience stores until they were removed because of the scourge they were.
When you talk about this and say “Oh, this is going to be in a casino where people come and we have means to deal with this”, my understanding is—and Mr. Comartin, you can correct me if I'm wrong—that all gambling is illegal except when it isn't. Even three-card monte, whatever that is, is illegal.
So we're saying, okay, what's now going to be legal is betting on a single race. Now, I thought we could do that at a racetrack, that you could place a bet on race one, race two, or race five or something. I remember having done that myself once or twice.
This is not necessarily by this legislation...all it does is leave it to the provinces to license as they see fit. They could give a licence to a football association if they wished. But that's up to the provinces. What this legislation does is really free up single-event betting to allow the provinces to regulate when or where it would occur.
Obviously, Mr. Comartin—and you're speaking for your constituents and based on your history—as an economic development tool, it doesn't seem to me to be problematic. The real problem might be if the unintended consequences actually come forward. Perhaps you might want to comment on that, Mr. Comartin.
I'd like to hear from the Canadian Gaming Association, too, because you fellows are representing the operators. What responsibility do you take for the kinds of consequences I'm talking about?
I'm talking about serious consequences in my province. We have histories of individuals who lost their homes, who committed suicide...with nobody helping them out. You'd go to bars and see people lined up when the bar opened, sitting at the machines, and there was nobody going in and asking to help them out. They're not people who would gamble online. They're not people who.... They have access; that's the key difference, I think.
The number of people may not change, but what can change is access. With controlled access through a casino, I don't see any difficulty, but once the cat is out of the bag, it's pretty hard to get it back in.