Online gambling undermines everything good that draws us to sports
There’s something sad about the effect that increased legal access to gambling has had on the wide world of spectator sports.
Bruce Kidd, a Canadian track champion in his time, wrote eloquently in the Globe and Mail about the diminution of sports’ inherent joys and uplift by slathering on new gambling opportunities, particularly online.
It’s ironic that when alcohol is finally facing possible mandatory exposure for its illness effects — by way of labelling — gambling flows ever more freely. Maybe that’s the regulatory hydraulics of a vice: shut down one and the impulse flows to another.
It infects everything, including the sports talk shows. The journos and ex-jocks can’t resist strutting their savvy about gambling, odds, the over-under. They sound like Damon Runyon characters in Guys and Dolls. I’ll die happy if I never have to hear the words, Al’s Brother, on TSN’s Overdrive again.
The folks, including governments, getting rich off all this, make de rigueur calls for moderation and mental health — which has become the get-out-of-jail card for almost everything ugly done by the powerful. In fact the numbers of problem gamblers are pegged far below problem drinkers — not that it matters if you’re caught up in it as my family was, due to my dad’s gambling addiction.
Is anything specific occurring right now that aids the voracious advances made by the gaming industry?
I’ve always believed — based, I grant, on the family album — that people gamble most destructively when they’ve lost all hope of legitimately rising through merit or effort. In other words, when the game’s clearly rigged. In my teens, when I argued with my dad that moral wrongs must be fought at any cost, he countered, “Even when they’re wrong, they’re right.”
But in the last 40 years of neoliberal policy, income gaps have risen to the levels of the Gilded Age; then, since COVID, they’ve gone even higher. So the appeal of pure chance (a.k.a. gamblers’ instincts, luck etc.) has risen too. Because the times are so unfair, potential gambling profits are staggering.
Spectator sports have always played the role of distraction from the harsh realms of socio-economic injustice. Fandom took you to a realm where money isn’t what mattered — sometimes literally. During the era of the Original Six, pro hockey players sold used cars during the summer. Success seemed to rely instead on merit, skill, determination.
Now, with gambling possible even during games — you can bet on individual moments, not just wins and loses — the ugly elements of reality that drove fans to games hoping that worthier values might prevail in life — have wormed their way back in, to mock those hopes in the act.
The government has paused the expansion of justifications for Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Act (MAID), which has already resulted in far more deaths here than comparable places like California.
CBC’s Fifth Estate ran a fine hour on it recently. Mostly it showed people and let them speak for themselves. Minister of Justice David Lametti was the face of Smug Liberalism. He said Canadians have “faith” in our medical personnel.
But MAID involves a small medical subset: some clearly honourable, others, in my opinion, questionable. That’s why caution’s required.
A sympathetic MD who’s been with the program from the start said he’ll drop out if “mental illness” gets added, per the current plan. It makes him “sad.” That’s a guy you want in the program.
A disabled man who couldn’t afford decent housing, applied for MAID. He didn’t want to die on the street. When word got out, people contributed enough to pay his rent. It was a “reprieve,” he said. Still, he thinks people deserve a dignified death if they aren’t allowed to live humanely. That’s complex thinking but he seemed up to it. I think I’d rather have him as justice minister than Lametti.
How much do I think this matters? If the changes pass, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised to repeal them, I’d vote for him next election. In a minute.
This column originally appeared intheToronto Star.
