19-Feb-07. Gambling money the lifeblood of sports groups. Edmonton Journal, C6.

Basketball Alberta and hundreds of other not-for-profit amateur sports groups all rely on the province for a significant portion of their funding. Former University of Alberta athletic director Ian Reade recently researched gambling’s dollar trail into amateur sports and found that virtually all government money given to these organizations comes from gambling revenues. Garry Smith, a gambling research specialist at the University of Alberta, suggest that a morally troublesome statistic for such sports groups is that 40 per cent of the province’s gambling revenue from slot machines comes from the five per cent of the population classified as problem gamblers. He also says that Alberta’s charitable model of gambling is a misnomer as only about 20 per cent of the money from the Alberta Lottery Fund goes to groups that might be considered non-profit, community-based and charitable.