Presentation to IAGR
September 29th, 2014
Philadelphia
Richard Guay

• Feb. 10th, 2010 - Announcement by Minister of
Finance of permission for Provincial State
Monopoly (LotoQuébec) to offer online gambling.
• Pressure from different interest groups
• July 9th, 2010 - Creation of Working Group (3-year mandate)
• Dec. 1st, 2010 - Online gambling offer begins

• Evaluate the social and health impact on the population.
• Propose model in order to curtail the illegal gambling offer.

• Health hypothesis
• Increase number of gamblers
• Increase in the prevalence of gambling problems
• Economic hypothesis
• Channelling of gamblers towards considered legal offer
• Improved trustworthiness and integrity of games
• Setup of effective responsible gaming tools
• Legal hypothesis
• Diminution of illegal online gambling offer

• Creation of an integrated monitoring system
• Scientific research model to ensure accuracy and independence of data
• Continuous and systematic collection and analysis of data

• Online gambling participation
• 2009: 1.4% 2012: 1.5%
• Online gambling patterns
• Not often, not long, not much
• Online gambling problems
• Too low to estimate

• Confusion between responsible offering of online gambling which should be done by the operator and the prevention of gambling problems under the responsibility of the health department or other independent body.
• Perception of a conflict of interest on the part of the provincial operator.

• Channelling of gamblers towards legal offer
• Only 22% of online gamblers exclusively government site
• Approximately 2,000 other sites available
• Improved trustworthiness and integrity of games
• Very few complaints
• As government site is self-regulated, there are no mechanism of external surveillance or control
• Difficult to assess if there is an improvement
• Setup of effective responsible gaming tools
• 50% decrease in use of responsible gambling tools
• Flashing game advertisement on "help" page with non validated test
• Other sites also had various responsible gambling tools

• Diminution of illegal gambling offer
• Routinely over 2,000 considered illegal sites - No change since government offer
• Not only more sites but they are closer to the
• Why ?
• Lack of strong signal from authorities
• Lack of law enforcement (difficulties, priorities, limited sign of organized crime involvement)
• Ambiguity of the criminal laws (no clear jurisprudence, legal elsewhere, presence of operators in Canada)

• Continued prohibition
• Filtering, formal notices, law enforcement, sensibilisation, restriction of public contract
• Change the criminal laws and open up the market
• Set up the rules, regulate properly, tax the profits, assure quality of operators. Focus on shadowy operators

• The only way to have a true picture of the impact of online gambling within a specified jurisdiction is by the use of an integrated independent multifaceted monitoring system.
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