Manitoba eyeing up online gambling

In Canada, the government for the western province of Manitoba has announced that it is considering joining British Columbia and Quebec in the global online gambling market.

According to a report from The Ottawa Citizen newspaper, the minister responsible for the administration of the Manitoba Lotteries Corporation Act, Steve Ashton, stated that the province does not have the power to regulate online gambling but could offer its own sites complete with strict safeguards.

“We're looking at it,” said Ashton, who is a member of the governing New Democratic Party.

“No decision has been made yet but I anticipate a decision sometime over the next few months.”

He stated that British Columbia and the nation’s Atlantic provinces have already launched sites while Quebec revealed in February that it would premiere online gaming by the autumn.

The Ottawa Citizen reported that there are an estimated 2,000 unregulated gambling sites on the Internet while online gaming revenues from Canadians grew by an average of 30 percent between 2003 and 2008 and could possibly exceed one billion dollars by 2011.

An article from the Winnipeg Free Press revealed that only 1.5 percent of the province’s 1.2 million residents had gambled online in 2006 but John Brody, Chief Executive Officer for the Addictions Foundation Of Manitoba, stated that it would be much more difficult to identify problem gamblers and help them if they were ‘locked away in their basement’ playing over the Internet.

“I think there is going to be some challenges for us, for all of us,” said Brody.

“We know the profits in this area have increased almost exponentially.”