gambling in alberta - Research Services - University of Lethbridge

daytime usage ... if it’s shopping centre or hotel, it all wraps up at 11 or 12. And it … impacts
things like, how you run your bus service, how much police you put out there. If you stand at
the corner of Whyte Avenue and 105th at 2 o’clock on a Friday afternoon you can count
somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 people. If you stand at the same intersection at 2 o’clock
in the morning, you will get somewhere 20,000 and 30,000 people [because of casinos].
Because you’ve got more people there, more *are+ at risk than you have during the day. We’ve
tried couple of trials around bussing, the trouble with those is that … we cannot fund it
continuously … So it very much changes the nature of your area when we have a casino.”
For cities like Edmonton, the lack of funding to meet these additional infrastructure demands
means that services have to be delivered in a more efficient fashion. For example, community
representatives have initiated a program of synchronization with police and emergency
response agencies to improve local land planning (i.e., road alignment). The goal is to try to
improve services while reducing costs. The general concern raised was that the municipalities
experience a minimal direct return on gambling but nonetheless bear the bulk of the
infrastructure costs. As one informant stated, “I think certainly, the 2 big cities position on this
has always been that it’s not about saying “it shouldn’t happen” it’s just that if we are going to
be required provide some of these services we need some of the money that goes along [to
support it].”
Interestingly, the remaining five cities, all of which are considered rural, stated that neither
casinos nor other gambling venues were negatively impacting their infrastructure. For
example, at Whitecourt “We really did not see the impact on any major infrastructure as a
result of the casino. So it’s not using current road infrastructure like our Wal-Mart or Canadian
Tire does. And we have a 10-year capital plan on this infrastructure. So, for example, our
repaving programs, and our traffic light programs we have it allocated increases to go along
with growth to the community.” A Camrose official stated “Absolutely not. It’s [the casino] is
located on a highway. You know, highway 13, which is built to handle, I don’t know, a hundred
times the traffic that it has now. So the casino contribution has been absolutely negligible.”
Lethbridge, Cold Lake, Grande Prairie, and St. Albert have their casinos located outside the
core, in or nearby industrial or commercial sectors. This may be why traffic and infrastructure
issues were not a concern. The only community to fall outside this general model was Red
Deer, which has two downtown casinos. Nonetheless, informants stated that infrastructure
issues were not a concern.
Gambling as an Acceptable form of Entertainment
When asked about local attitudes about the casino and gambling in general, a municipal official
from Camrose replied, “It’s something that the Alberta society and maybe North American
society has become accustomed to … legalized gambling in their backyard. It’s not much
different from a bar at the corner.” One mayor remarked “ … it’s everywhere in Canada. It’s
well controlled, and people have faith that the province or the authority is looking after it to
make sure it’s fair.”
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