Two Lethbridge professors will be among researchers conducting a $685,000 study looking at the impact of gambling in the province. The project, which is funded through the Alberta Gaming and Research Institute, is expected to take 26 months to complete.

Yale Belanger, a professor of Native American studies at the University of Lethbridge, said they’ll be looking at all forms of gambling, including casinos, horseracing, VLTs, bingo, lottery pull tabs and casinos on First Nations reserves.

“This is the thing that drives policy more than anything else, the presumption that the benefits do outweigh the costs, but very few studies have done a thorough and objective tallying of what those benefits and costs are so as to make a more informed policy decision.”

They will be using information gathered by Statistics Canada and Alberta Liquor and Gaming, as well as information they garner from surveys and focus groups.

Williams said previous research has suggested a small number of problem gamblers account for a good portion of gambling revenues. “So we want to identify who is benefiting the most from gambling and who is benefiting the least,” he said.

Belanger said communities that house casinos don’t necessarily see any benefit because money taken in at a casino is sent to Alberta Gaming and redistributed throughout the province. “So all the people here gambling at that casino could be experiencing a net loss compared to what is being redistributed by the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission,” he said.

Williams is one of the principal researchers and will be overseeing the project, as well as designing telephone surveys and questionnaires for focus groups. Belanger will examine First Nations casinos in the province. Also involved in the study are Brad Humphreys, who is a research chair in the economics of gambling at the University of Alberta and Harold Wynne, an independent researcher with a connection with the U of A, along with a number of grad students.

Belanger said the results of the study and the findings they produce will guide the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission in their future policy decisions as to whether or not they’ll halt future casino construction or allow it to expand.

“We’re really trying to answer the most fundamental question about gambling, which is the overall benefits versus the costs and how does it all add up,” said Rob Williams, a professor with the University of Lethbridge’s school of health sciences and the co-ordinator of the Alberta Gaming Research Institute.

“A lot of what we discover in the next two years is really going to influence the provincial gaming industry,” Belanger said. “It’s going to have an impact too on programing in terms of educational programs, in terms of whether more money should be converted to problem gambling programming and so on.”

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