At Odds: Gambling and Canadians, 1919–1969

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

In 1969, the federal government permitted both federal and provincial
governments to operate lotteries of any size. Today, we see the
fallout—citizens can gamble at their local grocery store, at
racetracks, and in a select number of casinos, strategically placed to
attract the tourist dollar. Gambling is now a huge industry employing
many; governments reap windfalls from the gambling they regulate, and
some unlucky citizens find themselves bankrupt, their marriages
collapsed, their jobs terminated—sometimes even their lives ended. Is
it worth it?

Before 1969, when gambling as we know it now was illegal, many
Canadians would have responded in the negative. In At Odds, Suzanne
Morton, an associate professor of history at McGill University, has
dissected the various forms of gambling in the half century before the
law was liberalized and in the process has attempted to relate attitudes
toward gambling to a variety of mindsets that characterized that
pre-modern generation. In Morton’s view, “attitudes towards gambling
in fact reflected the ‘big’ issues of society, such as work,
property, democracy gender, religion, governance and definitions of
community.”

The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. In the
first section, “Critics and Gamblers,” Morton examines the moral
concerns about gambling expressed by its opponents and then examines the
context of gambling activities between 1919 and 1945. In the middle
section, “Masculine, Feminine, Other,” she explores specific themes
of masculinity, femininity, and ethnicity as they relate to gambling. In
the final two chapters, “Reaction” and “Reform,” she combines
chronological periods and specific themes by examining the post-1945
panic about gambling and its links to organized crime, the postwar move
to amend the Criminal Code, and the linking of gambling with both the
welfare state and charitable fundraising.

The book, based on a wide variety of both primary and secondary
sources, focuses on the regulation of gambling in five Canadian
provinces—Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and British
Columbia. It’s regrettable that the remaining provinces were not
included, although one suspects that Morton’s conclusions might not
have altered had she done so. Even with this limitation, she has given
us a brilliant, groundbreaking, and complex slice of Canadian social
history.