Sometimes, when people want to keep something secret, it just waves a red flag.
And the harder they try to keep it a secret, the more concerning those efforts are — especially if the people trying to keep the secret represent the government.
On Oct. 9, 2016, someone — most likely a member of the media or a lawyer involved in a class-action suit — filed a freedom of information request about video lottery terminals run by the Atlantic Lottery Corporation.
The request was pretty simple. The requestor, whose name has been kept confidential, wanted to know how much revenue VLTs were bringing in for bar owners in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The documents the request turned up “included an email exchange between officials in the Department (of Finance), and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation. That exchange included a table which had the following information with respect to all VLT operators in the province: the retailer operating name; the location of the operation; and the total net revenue generated by VLTs operating from each retailer location for part of 2016.”
The Atlantic Lottery Corporation did not want the information disclosed.
The ALC has always been cautious about what it says publicly about VLTs. The machines, nicknamed the crack cocaine of gambling, are, simply put, designed to shave dollars out of you, while suggesting that you can beat the house. The machines prey on particularly human frailties; while the ALC will talk about things like “payout percentages” and gross revenues, the ALC (probably rightly) seems to believe that the knowledge of how much money was being skimmed from customers’ wallets might be, well, bad press.
Still, the Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Finance couldn’t find a reason to withhold the information, and told the ALC that in November 2016.
Then, the appeals began. First, the ALC appealed to the province’s privacy commissioner, where the lottery corporation lost.
If a government agency is going to be involved in gambling, it has to justify the morality of its decisions. And that means revealing its profits.
After the privacy commissioner’s ruling, the province once again said it would release the information.
Then, the ALC appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador. As a judge wrote about that appeal, “The basis of that appeal was the potential harm the release of information could impose on the business interests of VLT operators, without their having been given notice of the (access to information) request, and without their having had the opportunity to argue against release of the information.”
The ALC lost again.
But then, before the information could be released, the province’s bar owners somehow found out that the information might be released and argued it would be bad for business — because competitors might find out how individual bars were doing financially, because the public would know how much money was coming in, and because that might make the bars targets for criminals.
The government of Newfoundland argued that the bar owners didn’t own the information, so they couldn’t argue that it couldn’t be released.
What the latest case came down to is whether the concerns of the bar owners should have been considered. A judge decided On Dec. 11, 2019 that they should be, and has sent the whole matter back to the province’s privacy commissioner to essentially start again.
The Atlantic Lottery Corporation is a monopoly. The information they have about video lottery profits is not likely to help any competitor, for the simple reason that there aren’t any competitors. They are also owned and managed by the governments of the Atlantic provinces.
By the time the information is released — if it ever is — it will be years old, and hopelessly stale.
If a government agency is going to be involved in gambling, it has to justify the morality of its decisions. And that means revealing its profits.
If you’re too embarrassed to explain your actions, you probably shouldn’t be doing them.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky
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