Natives up the ante in gambling showdown with the province

David Parkins for The Globe and Mail

Victoria — From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Jul. 02, 2010 10:40AM EDT Last updated on Saturday, Jul. 03, 2010 11:20AM EDT

When the Ulkatcho Indian Band in the small community of Anaheim Lake created and sold break-open tickets as a fundraiser to help impoverished families deal with burial costs, the province’s gaming branch swooped down to stop the unauthorized gambling.

When the provincial government needed money for a new roof at BC Place, Premier Gordon Campbell approved a new 24-hour, 100,000-square-foot casino with every gambling product available in the province.

This week, first nations decided they had had enough of what they see as a double standard. Most provinces share a portion of their gambling proceeds with native communities, but the B.C. government has jealously guarded this revenue stream. Over the last four years, it has rejected every proposal to share its billion-dollar-plus annual profits. And it has been reluctant to approve casinos on first nations lands.

Chief Joe Hall, chair of the B.C. First Nations Gaming Initiative, said the story of what happened at Anaheim Lake is hardly unique, but it is the one that finally prompted native leaders to give up on trying to get a deal with Mr. Campbell’s government.

“You have the provincial government saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ How different is that from the outlawing of the potlatch?” he said. “It’s not their place to come into our communities to say how we raise money.”

So his organization is creating a B.C. first nations gaming commission, which will act as a parallel gaming authority on native land for the benefit of first nations communities. But setting up a gaming authority outside the province’s control is a defiant gesture. The odds of the province allowing that challenge to go unanswered are slim indeed.

The province says it is working on other revenue-sharing agreements, in sectors like forestry, mining and energy. But it maintains it has the sole authority to control the purse strings and to determine the location of casinos, community gaming centres and commercial bingo halls.

Any expanded gambling is a contentious move. (The B.C. Liberals once opposed any expansion of gambling – until they got into power and discovered how addictive the revenues can be.)

And first nations face additional resistance, rooted in a stereotype of the native bingo hall that is somehow a bigger blight on the landscape than, well, a non-native bingo hall.

It is such a cliché that Kim Baird, chief of the Tsawwassen First Nation, jokes about it. When her community was negotiating the first urban self-government agreement in B.C., she toyed with a tongue-in-cheek response to confront her neighbours’ fears.

“I have thought of doing a fake model, showing a line of bingo halls, penitentiaries and ugly big-box stores along the highway – all the terrible land use decisions that people assume we’d make,” she said.

The only example of an aboriginal-owned casino in this province is the Casino of the Rockies, a small but showy establishment nestled inside the luxurious St. Eugene Resort near Cranbrook.

This week, Sophie Pierre was honoured at the First Nations Canadian Gaming Awards with a lifetime achievement award for her role in establishing that casino when she was chief of the St. Mary's Indian Band. Ms. Pierre is now the chief commissioner of the B.C. Treaty Commission and must tread carefully around this topic.

She does recall the dire predictions that came with her band’s application: that the casino would bring ruin to her Ktunaxa Nation communities. The experience, eight years on, has been positive.

“We have shown at St. Eugene that having a casino in a tourist property is a good thing,” she said. The casino, golf course and resort complex has created steady employment, and it has also generated more respectful relations with the surrounding communities. “Our neighbours start to see us as economic partners,” she said.

But Ms. Pierre is also mindful that winning a casino licence isn’t like winning the lottery. The Ktunaxa are still paying off the debts for creating the resort, housed in a former residential school.

The bigger prize would be to pressure the province to move on revenue-sharing with gaming.

“B.C is still way behind the rest of the country,” she said. “As chief commissioner, I’m very supportive of the direction the government has taken to revenue-sharing [in other areas], and I’m looking for the day when they recognize that gaming revenue-sharing is as important for economic development and social development in aboriginal communities as it is for the rest of British Columbia.”