Canadian couple files class action over gambling
A Markham couple, Peter Dennis, 49, and his wife, Zubin Noble, 61, has filed a $3.5 billion class-action lawsuit against Ontario’s gaming agency on behalf of gamblers who complained they requested to be refused entrance from casinos but were still let in.
The suit charges that the class members are compulsive gamblers and their addiction “disrupts, compromises and ultimately destroys the lives of individual problem gamblers by causing a range of harms for them and their family members including emotional, social, financial, legal, employment, educational and health-related harms”. None of these claims have been proven in court as yet.
In the accusations, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation did not implement proper controls to make sure that its voluntary self-exclusion policy was carried out effectively.
The couple’s lawyer, Jerome Morse of Adair Morse LLP in Toronto, said the class action suit is meant to help addicted gamblers who have lost huge amounts of money and affected family members. There is hope that the suit would bring landmark revisions to casinos across Canada.
In the self-exclusion policy, gamblers are photographed and their personal information is registered and stored in binders at casinos. If they are nabbed trying to steal into a casino, they can be arrested for trespassing.
Apparently, only this memory-based enforcement was used and therefore failed terribly as a system.
Although the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation has expressed that it is up to individuals to enter casino premises on their own accord, but it has also said it might consider using face recognition technology to make their system more foolhardy.
Ontario has been hit with nine individual lawsuits related to gambling self-exclusion but it is the first time it has a class action lawsuit filed against it.
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