Adrian MacNair
July 23, 2010 – 9:51 am
The much-ballyhooed B.C. government gambling website, which cost the provincial government $7.3 million dollars in the hope it would increase gambling revenue by $100 million for the province, failed spectacularly within the first week.
According to media reports, PlayNow.com was shut down within hours of launching when overwhelmed by traffic. This was followed up by a privacy breach on Tuesday, with 134 accounts being compromised.
Worse than privacy concerns, it is alleged that a number of users managed to gamble on the site using other users’ money. Failure quite simply doesn’t get more spectacular than that.
The government is still hoping to go ahead with the website, but has vowed to recover the money from the website contractor if they are unable to deliver a working version.
What’s most worrisome is that the government appears to have been doing damage control by lying about the true nature of the crash. Allowing the public to believe it was server capacity, rather than a security breach, goes again to the inability of Premier Gordon Campbell’s government to tell the truth when faced with a crisis.
As Michael Smyth points out in the Province, the man responsible for promoting the website is the same man responsible for policing problem gambling in British Columbia. While Rich Coleman insists the problems are not as great as reported, one can’t help but think of the expression “the fox guarding the hen house.”
As I intimated in my radio interview about this topic last week, I was concerned about a provincial online gambling site that claimed to be able to keep the good guys in, and the bad guys out. Protecting the personal information of British Columbians, keeping track of users’ money, and trying to keep global hackers at bay, is a tall order to fill. Too tall for Campbell’s government, apparently.
The jury is still out on whether it’s ethical to simultaneously lecture on the ills of problem gambling, while providing an online service that is likely to draw in those same gamblers. It is altogether more worrying when the government makes clear it can’t run a website that protects the privacy of its users and security against abuse.
Let’s face it. The B.C. Liberals have abandoned any pretense of ethics in their scramble for cash, no matter the social or financial cost to others.
National Post
Adrian MacNair is a Vancouver writer and blogger. Read more here.
SOL SPEAKS BUT GAZETTE DOESN’T LISTEN.
UNPUBLISHED LETTER
Dear Editor,
I am concerned about the decision of the Admissions Department of McGill University (Gazette July 28/10) to remove the MCAT from their standardized admission test to McGill’s Medical School.. At present, almost all Canadian and U.S medical schools require applicants to submit MCAT scores. According to Dr. Saleem Razack, Assistant Dean of Admissions, Quebec would have kept the MCAT if there were a French equivalent of the test. He furthermore claims he had met with MCAT representatives about the possibility of translating the exam into French, but found “it was too complicated”.
That brings into play the question of how solid is a widely-used, highly respected test that cannot be translated? This is a test that has been considered the ‘gold standard’ of testing for admission to Medical Schools across Canada and much of the United States. Harvard University Medical School requires applicants to pass the test. In Canada, two-thirds of our universities use the MCAT. Among the universities who do not use it, we count Universite de Montreal, Laval University and UQAM. If McGill abandons this exam, we are also making the entrance for less qualified anglophones easier. This will nullify the intended benefit to many of the francophones it was intended to help.
The Faculty of Medicine is not a faculty where the quality of graduates is variable. These are the future surgeons who may be operating on us, our children and our grandchildren. In my opinion, this proposal by the Admissions Department clearly means that we are “dumbing down” the level of education in order to attract more francophones to the programme, regardless of what the consequences may be.
Respectfully submitted,
Sol Boxenbaum
Talk show host
Commentator