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Colin Campbell
Criminology Instructor
The deck was stacked in his favour.
It was the summer of '69 when Colin Campbell hit the job jackpot. A university student in Alberta, he was about to be laid off from a summer job on a construction crew when his friends convinced him to come to blackjack training.
"I was scared," recalls Campbell, who teaches criminology at Douglas College. "I was a klutz with a deck of cards and I thought my friends were trying to suck me into some sort of poker game. But I went and they taught me how to deal."
The deck was stacked in his favour. In 1967, Edmonton's agricultural fair offered casino gambling for the first time. In 1969, gambling took off and Campbell landed a job dealing blackjack at the Calgary Stampede.
"It was exciting, it was fun and it was also very lucrative – for me, my employers and the Calgary Stampede," says Campbell, who now lives in Coquitlam. "It was so lucrative, that the Regina exhibition wanted to have a casino too. Within a matter of days, Regina hired us to work their casino. That was a blast. We were making great money, staying in great hotels, living like high rollers."
The next summer gambling went on a roll. Many more agricultural fairs jumped on the bandwagon and Campbell pulled in $750 a week working the fairs, an excellent wage for 1970.
When he finished his Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education, Campbell went to work full-time as a dealer. Alberta had began to license charity casinos and the money was too good to resist. But after a few years the chips were down – opportunities for promotion were limited unless he wanted to leave Canada for Vegas or the Caribbean. Campbell played his wild card – he went back to school to pursue a Master's in Sociology, focusing on gambling.
His niche was perfect. His thesis at the University of Calgary landed him on the six o'clock news. Professors encouraged him to do a PhD, which he earned at SFU. When the media needed expert commentary on gambling, they'd call him. Later he served as a policy analyst for BC's Bingogate inquiry into the handling of gambling funds by the former NDP government. In 1997, he started teaching criminology at Douglas College.
His latest project looks at the explosion of gambling in Canada, and the consequences. The Law Commission in Canada gave the Douglas College criminology instructor and two University of Alberta sociologists funding for a two-year project, part of a larger initiative called What is a crime?
Campbell says, "Generally, they're asking, what is a crime? How do we deal with behaviours we don't like? Do we rely too much on criminal law to make people conform?"
Six groups of researchers are examining different subjects: medicare fraud, Aboriginal access to natural resources, the welfare crackdown, incidents in public housing projects, hunting and fishing laws, privacy legislation and gambling.
"The opportunity to participate in a project of this magnitude and diversity is tremendous for professional development as an instructor," he says. "Not only am I expanding my gambling expertise, I'm also gaining first-hand knowledge about other issues that I can share with my students at Douglas College."
Campbell and his colleagues will compare legal gambling in Canada with US, Britain and Australia.
"Over the last 30 years, there's been incredible transformation in the law," says Campbell. "We've gone from gambling being prohibited to gambling being licensed and operated by governments. Compulsive gambling has become a huge concern."
Other issues include the crimes gambling addicts commit to fuel their addiction and illegal gambling. Campbell says, "One of the justifications the government used was that legal gambling would drive organized crime out of the marketplace. That hasn't happened."
Illegal gambling still exists, and now police don't have the resources to go after illegal gambling, he says. "If the government offered a competitive product, it would legally drive illegal gambling out of the marketplace, but government gambling tends to have the worst odds – the terms are very unfavourable to the player," says Campbell. "And some police say it's hypocritical to be wasting their time chasing illegal gambling when the government runs all kinds of legal gambling. Sometimes they say the only difference between legal and illegal gambling is that the government isn't getting the money."
There's a vibrant, healthy underground market of poker clubs, bookmaking, sports and Internet betting in BC that has, until now, been virtually untouched by the law, says Campbell.
But this is changing. BC's Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch (GPEB) hires former police officers and others to monitor bingo and casinos to make sure there's no cheating and criminal behaviour. Campbell says GPEB's mandate is likely to be expanded to monitor and police illegal gambling.
Campbell is also concerned about the growth of gambling, and particularly the proliferation of slot machines, in BC
According to Statistics Canada, about four percent of the Canadian population has a problem controlling their appetite for gambling. Annually, about 88 percent of Canadians participate in some form of gambling. "The Douglas College Foundation has 50-50 draws to raise money for student bursaries and scholarships. A lot of people who participate wouldn't say they are gambling, but they are," says Campbell.
Gambling isn't good or bad, he says. It's our relationship with gambling that defines it. He'd like to see more public awareness programs to educate British Columbians about gambling.
"Most people don't understand their odds are not good," he says. "Some people develop false beliefs that if they persist eventually they'll win. Well, the odds don't change. The house will win. If you persist in playing you'll lose. A lot of people don't understand that."
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