Before we dig into the peculiarities of online gambling in Alberta and the prospects of its development, let’s take a short look at the Canadian online gambling scene as a whole. If you are a gambler in Canada, you probably know that it’s not the country with the clearest online gambling laws in the world. While the Canadian Criminal Code regulates the land-based activities, the online gambling is left on the provinces responsibility and each of them tries to get the most of this situation. Almost each of them, to be precise.
While most of the provinces are already running their own state-owned online casinos to turn the profits from the international online gambling websites to the local ones, Alberta is one of a few provinces that still doesn’t have a local Alberta online casino and doesn’t really regulate any of the online gambling activities on its territory. As for now, the Alberta gamblers have all the access to the world’s best online casinos and can safely bet wherever they want.
Nevertheless, the province government started to think about the introducing of its own online casino long ago. Back in 2010, the first talks started to appear but a year later, in 2011, it was announced that the local authorities decided to step back and not to join a community of Canadian provinces opening their own gambling websites. The main reason for not giving this idea a go was the critical number of gambling addicts in the province — according to the reports, about 40% of the province online gambling revenue came from those not able to keep themselves from betting. The Alberta government thought the appearance of the local online casino would even increase this number resulting in the huge problematic online gambling issues.
Four years later, in 2015, the question came up once again. This time, the chief of the main Alberta gambling-regulating body Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission officially announced that the authorities are seriously considering to open the local online casino that will increase the province’s gambling revenue significantly. He also stated that every year about $150 million are given out to the offshore online gambling websites by the players from Alberta and it would have a positive effect on the province economy if those money doesn’t go abroad. As for the gambling addiction issues, it was decided to fight this problem with the more investments into the addiction-recovery programs and not by preventing the addicts from playing in the state-owned online casinos, obviously.
The thing is, the time has come and nothing has really changed since then. Today, in 2018, the province of Alberta is still missing the state-owned online casino and the talks are still being carried on about how soon it may come to the local online gambling market. Considering the Alberta favourable economic situation and especially its oil reservoirs, we can say that it’s gambling history is only being started, as oil always means money and money always means gamblers coming to the place or to the online casino, in this case.
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