gambling in alberta - Research Services - University of Lethbridge

account for revenue derived from out-of-province residents is somewhat difficult to determine.
Theoretically, it should not be large. Although Alberta is an attractive tourist destination, it is
doubtful that many people come here for the purposes of gambling as our main neighbors
(British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Montana) all provide very similar gambling opportunities to
Alberta. Rather, the main source of gambling-related tourism is likely people who have
travelled to Alberta to visit relatives or other attractions, but also opted to visit a casino while
they were here.
Alberta Tourism reports that there were 2.4 million people who visited Alberta from other parts
of Canada in 2008 (primarily from British Columbia and Saskatchewan) and another 1.6 million
people who visited Alberta from the United States and overseas. The average length of stay
was 11.7 days for overseas visitors, 4.7 days for U.S. visitors, and approximately 5 days for
other-province visitors. The Travel Survey of Residents of Canada (TSRC) 34 documents that
5.4% of other-province visitors reported going to a casino while in Alberta in 2007 and 4.8% in
2008. Thus, if we assume that roughly 5% of all visitors visit a casino in any given year, then the
best estimate of the number of non-Alberta residents who have visited an Alberta casino in
recent years is about 200,000 people per year. Even if all of these 200,000 people went to a
casino twice while they were here and spent twice as much as Alberta residents, it is clear this
would still represent a tiny fraction of Alberta casino patronage and revenue. Although
attendance figures are not available for Alberta casinos, there are a few comparison points
worth noting: e.g., there were 1,664,000 attendees just to Alberta horse race tracks in 2008
(HRA, 2009); and popular individual casinos in neighbouring provinces have between 5,000 to
10,000 visitors a day (e.g., River Rock Casino in British Columbia; Casino Regina).
Thus, it is clear that almost all Albertan gambling revenue dollars represents money spent by
Albertans. This is a very important fact not just in the determination of average gambling
expenditure per adult Albertan, but in assessing the overall economic benefits of gambling to
Alberta (something discussed later in this report).
Thus, total net revenue divided by the number of adult Albertans does give a reasonable
estimate of average adult expenditure on gambling in Alberta. It will be a slight underestimate,
as it does not include out-of-province gambling expenditure by Albertan residents. However, as
later analyses will show, this is also very small relative to in-province expenditure. Also, the
inclusion of these amounts would not reflect the impact of the provision of legal gambling in
Alberta to Albertans, which is the purpose of this section.
Figure 17 shows the per adult gambling expenditure as a function of year. All these figures
have adjusted for inflation to show what their values would be in 2010 dollars. Similar to the
findings for Total Net Revenue, there has been a very marked rise in per adult expenditure.
Current expenditures are almost five times higher than expenditures in the 1970s. Most of this
34 The TSRC is sponsored by Statistics Canada, the Canadian Tourism Commission, the provincial governments and two
federal organizations. It is a supplement to the monthly Labour Force Survey that is administered to 54,000 households.
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