Booze and gambling are Alberta’s real gusher

Alberta’s gaming and booze revenue exceeded its conventional oil royalties in the 2012-13 fiscal year. Think about it: we get more money from drinking and gambling in this province than we get from those oil royalties.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Sure, there are other royalties, and progress is being made on pipelines that could help Albertans get their “fair share” of oil revenues. These days, though, we’ve got a more ready source of cash.

Statistics released from the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission show the government raked in more than $2.2 billion from gambling and drinking in the past fiscal year. Jackpot! As an income stream, this revenue now represents more than five per cent of the entire provincial budget.

So basically, you’ve got your dice throwing, card flipping, coin slot gamblers over here, and you’ve got your thirsty people swilling beers, shots, wine and cocktails over there.

Put them all together, perhaps on some giant Lake Minnewanka riverboat cruise, and over the past few years at least, it’s charting as a more reliable and growing source of government income than royalties from conventional oil. Our ship’s come in!

Is this the income stream that lifts all boats? Well, money from gambling does go into the Alberta Lottery Fund, which supports various programs, projects and foundations. And charities were winners, with proceeds from gaming rising from $314 million the previous year to $330 million.

The government take of almost $1.49 billion for gaming was about $150 million more than the commission initially projected. It based its lower projections on concerns about a less robust economy. But a growing, relatively young population of more than four million with disposable income and an entrepreneurial spirit (“I’ll put $100 on red”) has likely helped to power the spending.

Almost a billion and a half is a lot of dough. Where does it come from? You might be surprised to learn that most of that govern- ment and charity gambling revenue has come from a very small percentage of the population, a disproportionate number of which are problem gamblers. They’re the ones helping to keep our boat afloat.

Break it down and you find that 75 per cent of reported gambling expenditure comes from roughly six per cent of the population, according to the Alberta Gaming Research Institute-commissioned 2011 study Gambling In Alberta. The most distinguishing feature of these individuals, adds the report, is the fact that 40.6 per cent of them are problem gamblers.

If someone had asked me (over a drink in a bar, perhaps) to guess what relatively small group of Albertans was responsible for $1.49 billion in govern- ment revenue, I would have guessed it would be comprised of oil barons. Nope.

Even back in 2009, Alberta gambling revenue was expected to outstrip oil royalties, according to provincial budget forecasts for 2009-10. So this year’s news isn’t a shock, but it does raise some questions.

“It is ethically problematic for governments and charity organizations to be drawing such a significant percentage of their revenue from a vulnerable segment of the population,” says the report.

The government revenue has to come from somewhere, but do we really want booze and gaming to be the gusher? In Alberta, we’re free of a sales tax and we have a flat income tax, rather than one that is progressive. We might ask our- selves how we can afford to do so and how much we want to bet on volatile oil and gas and royalties.

Hey, if people want to drink and gamble, I’m not telling them to stop. Alberta is not the only province cashing in on this kind of revenue. And I’ve seen the good that lotteries can do for charitable groups and their communities.

I can’t do much, save for asking the government to demand a bigger (more fair?) piece of the oil royalty pie. But I did go to the Deerfoot Inn & Casino this past weekend to see a show, drop some money on the gaming tables and sip some booze, doing my bit to keep the province afloat.