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10/27/2008: Canada’s Gambling Watch Network’s Newsletter
Volume 10 Issue 010 CWE October 27 2008
Addiction
Gambling Addictions, is a post in the 10/20/08 Play or Gamble Online blog, written by a lover of gambling who doesn’t see the difference between risky business and real gambling.
Parents fear Internet addiction, an AP article in The 10/24/08 Toronto Star, contains not a word about the online gambling that has attracted and addicted many youngsters!
Internet Addiction - Tips for parents
Health
Suicide prevention mandatory for national accreditation, an article in The 10/21/08 Globe and Mail, reports that, starting in January, Canadian hospitals and nursing homes seeking a national stamp of approval will have to develop suicide-prevention programs. We see this news of great importance because it’s a well-known fact that gambling addicts tend to see suicide as their only way out of their troubles.
Scrabble
Saskatoon man nabs Scrabble title is an article in the 10/20 Calgary Herald. Can some one tell us if scrabble is really gambling?
Finance
In defense of Greed is an article in the 10/18 Vancouver Sun by Niels Veldhuis, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver we wrote about last week. He writes that our financial system is positively fuelled by self-interest. (link: Fraser Institute - admin) Veldhuis:
However, “greed” (or less derisively and more accurately “self-interest”) is not the problem or the reason for the crisis. Wall Street, Bay Street, Main Street, my street and every other street in North America is built on individuals and businesses pursuing their own self-interest.
Self-interested individuals and businesses are the backbone of our economy, vital to economic progress and society’s well-being, and ought to be celebrated rather than be demonized.
Start with the definition of greed, “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something than is needed,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. But who exactly should determine what is really “needed,” and by what measure?
Do we all really “need” mobile phones and iPods? Is it “excessive” for a family to have two cars and a 2,000-square-foot house? Do we “need” to eat out as often as we do or buy the latest clothing fashions? What is “needed” is a subjective judgment and makes the definition of “greed” vacuous.
The reality is that “greed” is a contemptuous word that is purposely used to stir emotions and negatively smear the principal tenet of human behaviour, self-interest. Simply put, self-interest is the human desire to improve our situation or the “concern for one’s own advantage and well-being,” according to Merriam-Webster.
On 10/23/08 we saw another item by him that more or less replaced the word ‘greed’ by ‘self-interest’. One item in the 10/23/08 Toronto Star on this subject is called: Need it, make it, lose it, love it. The ‘it’ is money.
Vegas comes up snake eyes, an item in The 10/22/08 Gazette, deals with the present trouble in sin city.
The Las Vegas area has been hit with the largest amount of home foreclosures in the country as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Four years ago, Sin City led the rest of the nation to the top of the housing roller coaster, posting consecutive quarters with housing appreciation gains of 40 per cent and 50 per cent. By 2006, the median home price here had soared to a record $315,000 as buyers armed with sub-prime mortgages snapped up the surfeit of McMansions being built on the city’s outer fringes.Nevada languishes as America’s foreclosure capital, leading the U.S. for 20 straight months. In Las Vegas, one of every 75 homes received a foreclosure filing in August and median prices crashed back under $200,000 in September.
In August 2008 Nevada gambling revenues were $931 million, down 8.1 per cent from $1.01 billion a year ago.
Crime
Retrial ordered in 1992 murder of bingo tycoon, an item in The 10/22/08 Globe and Mail, will cause us to look back to that time in order to see if bingo’s gambling was related to that killing. If it was, we intend to get back to that next week.
The father and son, both serving life sentences are eligible for bail.
Companies gouged by heftier frauds, an item in The 10/23/08 Gazette, reports that Canada is joining the big leagues in economic crime.
Just over half of Canadian companies polled by Price-WaterhouseCoopers in its latest global economic crime survey reported being victims in the previous two years, with an average loss of $3.7 million, up from $600,000 in the survey done two years earlier.
The article says that accountants do not know the reason for this jump, but we are convinced that legal gambling growth plays quite a roll in this increase. We’ve seen too many fraud stories related to gambling losses!
Horse Racing
Horse lover targets Magna, a 10/21/08 Financial Post item, reports that Halsey Minor has set his sights on the hobbled horse-racing assets of one of Canada’s richest men: Frank Stronach.
Mr. Minor released a letter on Friday that he sent to the board of directors of MI Developments Inc., the real-estate company controlled by Mr. Stronach, offering to buy an estimated $268.2-million worth of loans that MID has given to Magna Entertainment Corp., Mr. Stronach’s money-losing horse racing and gambling company.
The article makes it clear that Mr. Minor sees himself himself as a ‘saviour of sorts’ for the North American horse racing industry. So far we haven’t seen a reaction to this plan.
Ontario
Every third month the Ontario Lottery Corp. sends cheques to municipalities for the cash amounts that slot machines have pirated for them. In this week we saw eight articles that accompanied those cheques, and next week we hope to have the time and space to report the amounts those municipalities received. In this Newsletter we want to talk about a very important question: does that money really do any good for them?
Let us first tell you why we want to write about that. On Saturday morning we found two lengthy items – one about a gambling addict and the other about a ‘racino’ discussion – indicating that Canada’s Gambling Watch Network is not the only group that is totally opposed to what our governments are doing gambling-wise.
Every thinking human knows that our lives are full of uncertainties. In the last few weeks our politicians have often used the word ‘gambling’ to indicate that they were not sure of the outcome of their decisions. That is one reason why it was so stupid for them to legalize what they call ‘gaming’. The money our municipalities get for the slot machines’ profit would have been spent in better ways if those addictive machines were not there! It would have gone to local businesses, to the maintenance or to the improvement of houses, to better education of children, to medications that prevent sickness, to charities, to whatever!
Nova Scotia
Gambling season begins for homeowners on price caps is one of the times that the word gambling is used to describe the financial uncertainties in peoples’ lives.
Touchpoint talks about the Nova Scotia provincial study on gambling. (2007 Adult Gambling Prevalence study -admin) It says:
According to the study “2.3% (or approximately 18,000 adults in Nova Scotia) self-reported ever having a problem with the amount of time or money spent on gambling, with 1.4% (equivalent to 11,000) reporting current problems’. Our co-worker Bernie Walsh writes this about it: ‘At least these Government officials see the real truth and serious truths about VLT gambling mostly but gambling in general.
J. Deviet