Bingo News: The Canadian Lotto Row Rumbles on at $100 Million

The Canadian Press is closely monitoring several of the provincial scandals in the Canadian lotto industry. The lottery fraud is described as “blistering” based on a report that has been filed in Ontario, which provides you with proof that the fix (Canadian Press) is definitely guarding the henhouse (lottery). A group of concerned citizens known as the “Gambling Watch Network” says that the Federal Government in Ottawa should indeed lead a long inquiry that is overdue into how provinces both police and profit from Canada’s multibillion dollar betting industry.

Brian Yealland made the comment that “the honeymoon’s over”, he is a spokesman for the watchdog group. Stating that “you’ve got a situation where the regulator, the operator, the profit maker and the policing agency are all appointed by each other, the system is just as corruptible if governments run it as of the mob ran it. It’s just not working”. When it comes to gambling it doesn’t matter who is running the show, all that matters is how they are running the show. In this case there may be a situation where the gambling industry is just in the wrong hands and if you have one person in the organization that is corrupt than there are sure to be other hands putting in on the deal. Yealland says that the sheer scale of conflicting interests helps explain the report that was made Monday that the people that are selling the lottery tickets have fraudulently collected at least one hundred million in the province since the year of 1999.

Andre Marlin, an Ontario ombudsman, found that the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation ignored the allegations of crime for years. He laid the blame on the provincial body’s fixation “on the profit rather than public service”. The new agency however, reports that the betting business has never been better. However, there has been a steep upward arc tracked by the Statistics Canada of gambling cash as lotteries, video lottery terminals and casinos that has spread across the country. The net revenue from such government ran operations soared from $2.7 billion in the year of 1992 to $12.9 billion in the year of 2005. When you have gambling industries that are bringing in this kind of cash, you need to make sure that there are no loose ends because there is the possible that someone is doing something that they are not supposed to not in less business is just that good and you got the information or proof to back that up.