Online Gambling: Canada now with first legal online casino

Online Gambling: Canada now with first legal online casino The Canadian province of British Columbia has now become the first in North America to welcome legalized online gambling in its purest form - the online casino. The British Columbia Lottery Corporation opened the doors of the first online casino in Canada to be ran by the government, a milestone in the online gambling industry in North America. The new online gambling website offers all casino games imaginable and is hosted under the name PlayNow.com, which has been the website of the lottery for 6 years. As a rule, only residents of British Columbia, 19 and over, will be able to play at the online casino and a weekly limit of $9,999 has been set in place for those gamblers.

British Columbians spend $100 million a year on illegal offshore gambling sites, according to the province Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman and he believes that offering those Canadian online gamblers a casino website ran by the lottery would greatly improve accountability, while estimation that over $40 million in extra revenue will pour annually in the government's coffers. "...we are putting as many responsible gambling initiatives and layers in place to support our players," the B.C. Lottery Corporation president Michael Graydon commented on the safeguards in place to avoid problem gamblers from accessing the casino website. Cross reference checks will be ran every time to ensure that players willing to sign up and gamble at the online casino are not on a self-exclusion list.

The fact that this online casino, which is under the direct control of the B.C. Lottery Corporation, i.e. a government-ran online gambling website, comes from a Canadian province which once deemed all online gambling as evil and wrong is an important one and the progress and future performance will be watched closely not only by those opposing the creation of the Canadian province government's first dip into the online gambling market, but from online casino companies willing to legalize their presence in the United States, another country having a double standard towards online gambling (online horse betting is legal in the U.S., which online sports betting is not). If the Canada's first legal online casino succeeds in creating an online gambling environment free of problems and controversies, that success will be certainly used by other gambling companies in their strive to legalize online casino gambling in the United States.

Published on 07/19/2010