CANADIAN TRIBE REACTS TO ALBERTA GOVERNMENT PROBE

16 February 2007

Alexander band's online gambling bid has an outside chance, experts say but they have to show betting was an ancestral activity

The Edmonton Jourbal published a follow-up to the story that a Canadian First Nation band was planning to become another Kahnawake-like haven for online gambling (see previous InfoPowa report) this week.

The Journal claims that legal experts are of the opinion that the Alexander First Nation can successfully fend off a showdown the government has threatened over the band's attempts to create a haven for online casinos.

The Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission is investigating the Edmonton-area band, which has constructed facilities and is offering licences for online poker, casinos or sports-betting houses, but has apparently not started operations. The provincial body deems that any gaming schemes taking place outside its regulations is against the Criminal Code.

"Being illegal - we will take every action to ensure that it doesn't happen in Alberta," said Solicitor General Fred Lindsay, minister responsible for the AGLC.

Just as other aboriginal groups have established constitutional self-governing rights to logging, fishing and hunting, the Alexander band could get a legal imprimatur to host offshore Internet gambling firms.... if it can prove that wagering was a major part of the band's ancestral heritage, gaming-industry lawyer Michael Lipton said.

Several bands have failed at the Supreme Court and lower courts to have gambling declared as an inherent right. However, the most recent high court case in 1996 that upheld convictions against Ontario bands has helped set the test for what Alexander or other groups must prove to qualify for sovereignty over gambling, he said.

"If the facts exist to demonstrate that a rudimentary - very rudimentary - form of gambling exists, be it in the form of stones and sticks or beads or whatever the case may be, the law says that if they've got the facts, this is the law, they have to follow it," said Lipton, head of an international association of gaming lawyers.

Morden C. Lazarus wrote an article last summer in the journal Gaming Law Review about the legal case behind the longstanding online casino venture run by the Kahnawake Mohawk of Quebec.

Although authorities have never cracked down on the Kahnawake scheme authorities believe is illegal, Lazarus argues the Mohawk have centuries-old traditional gaming practices they can prove should they ever be hauled into court. "It's the entitlement test," he said. "If they can survive the entitlement test the Supreme Court of Canada set out, then they would have the ability to succeed."

The Alexander band has remained silent on the issue, but apparently wants to charge up to $40 000 annually, plus startup fees, to offshore companies which set up computer servers in the Alexander reserve's new data centre.

The chief of the Enoch Cree Nation, which has longtime cultural links to Alexander, said the region's aboriginal people organised wagering games long before contact with European colonisers.

Law professor Moe Litman of the University of Alberta acknowledged the possibility that Alexander could succeed where other bands have failed in getting courts to view gaming as an inherent aboriginal right.

"But the technicalities of doing that make it a very, very uphill battle," said Litman, an expert in aboriginal self-government law. "You have to essentially prove that ... it's the kind of activity that was an integral part of pre-contact culture. It's a pretty difficult thing to do."

Litman suggested a band would likely have to find documentary evidence of the activities and their cultural importance, such as explorers' journal entries, oral tradition and other documentary proof.

Meanwhile, Alberta Justice is working with the AGLC on the Alexander band investigation, ministry spokesman David Dear said.

Online Casino News courtesy of InfoPowa

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