Comment 86381

By Pxtl (registered) - website | Posted February 15, 2013 at 19:48:37

What bugs me is that, in Ontario, gambling is partially run by the Ontario government.

The Ontario government knows how much you earn. We have income tax here. It knows how much you gamble, because they have a monopoly on the industry. They could trivially set up an automated system that makes sure you don't gamble more than you can afford.

They already control access to the casinos for voluntary withdrawal. They already keep track of how much everyone wins and loses. They already know our income because it's the provincial government. None of the sensitive data has to leave the government... the CRA could easily just run a web-service that takes a person's driver's license number, provincial ID, or SIN and checks it against their income and their gambling-losses-to-date and says "no, you are no longer permitted to gamble until the next tax-year, you've hit your allotted rock-bottom". I know I'm not the only programmer with enough hubris to think "yeah, I could pull that off and it wouldn't even be that hard".

Well, in theory. In practice it would somehow become a boondoggle like the long-gun registry. But either way, you get my point - they have all the necessary information at their finger-tips and they have access to the point-of-service for gambling. They're everywhere they need to be to develop a loss-cap on gambling in-house.

But they do not. Because they don't really want to stop Ontarians from flushing all their savings down the drain.

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