Over the years, the Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corp. (OLG) has modernized the province’s bingo halls by turning them into slot parlor casinos. This is despite the fact that slot machines are illegal in the area.
Interestingly enough, despite the money spent on them, the de facto casinos have actually lost money, according to the Ministry of Finance.
The machines at these bingo halls have another distinction: a wager limit that makes it possible for players to lose up to $12 per minute. This is shocking to Kevin Harrigan, a slots expert and recently retired professor of computer game design at the University of Waterloo, who was interviewed by the Toronto Star as he wandered through Delta Bingo & Gaming in Toronto, sampling machines. “I’m kind of stunned that they’re allowed to have that limit,” he said. “Say you’re doing 10 spins per minute, you’d be losing $12 per minute on average.” Such machines are quite addictive, Harrigan insists.
What really surprises Harrigan is that this bingo hall has nearly 200 electronic slot machines that wouldn’t be out of place in Las Vegas. Delta has four such locations in the city, each with about 100 machines.
An investigation by the Star identified dozens of bingo locations in Ontario that were modernized under the auspices of OLG, which calls them “charitable gaming centers,” because a percentage goes to 2,200 charities. The halls have a total of 2,900 gaming machines, which, although the odds are based on bingo, still end up siphoning money from players.
When the bingo halls were modernized, OLG assured Toronto and other cities that they wouldn’t have slot machines—because the cities didn’t want them.
Harrigan says the cities are right not to want slot machines. He told the Star: “Now, people can do things like lose their mortgage or their house or have suicidal thoughts because of all the money they’re losing. Now, you can lose a lot of money in a hurry.” Harrigan added, “These bingo halls clearly weren’t set up to have slot machines. I think they should be banned immediately.”
Bingo halls have been in decline for nearly 20 years. Their numbers in Ontario fell from 230 in 2002 to 65 just ten years later. Operators hoped that machines based on bingo would rescue the industry that has become identified with senior citizens making a social event out of the ritual of paper cards, dabbers and sitting in a favorite seat. In other words, to appeal to a younger audience. Also hurting bingo halls was the march of smoking bans—because lots of bingo players like to smoke.
University of Birmingham law professor Kate Bedford wrote in 2018: “Bingo halls—populated disproportionately by the old, the poor, and the Indigenous (although admittedly skewed female)—(were) heavily impacted by smoking bans.” This, she added, “created incentives to automate gambling, via introducing more slot machines in bingo environments so as to recoup profits.”
For years the Commercial Gaming Association of Ontario (CGAO) and the Ontario Charitable Gaming Association (OCGA) lobbied OLG and the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO), which regulates all gaming in the province.
They got what they wanted. By 2010 they were regularly opening new bingo halls that attracted new players. They introduced computerized bingo cards and play-on-demand tabletop bingo devices and bingo that worked on mobile devices. This included OLG promising city councils that slot machines were not part of the “modernization.”
For example, in 2013, Toronto approved a proposal for bingo halls to “offer electronic bingo and other electronic games in bingo halls, excluding slot machines.”
Under the OLG’s standard charitable gaming contract, bingo hall operators receive 47 percent of net revenues, local charities and the OLG collect 25 percent, and the city collects 3 percent. However, audits by the Ministry of Finance found that OLG’s bingo initiative spent hundreds of millions of dollars modernizing, and has never recouped its losses. The provincial government has been making up the difference.
According to last year’s audit report: OLG lost $182 million between 2013 and 2020: “Despite embracing a strategy that is designed to transfer financial risks to the (bingo hall operators), OLG has been the entity losing monies since the start of the cGaming modernization strategy.”
Now some city officials are punching back. Toronto councilmember Mike Layton, who fought a modernized casino ten years ago, says about the bingo hall in his city: “It’s not adding to the economic generation of the community. It’s just taking from it.”
