All or Nothing: Video Lottery Terminal Gambling and Economic Restructuring in Rural Newfoundland

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ALL OR NOTHING: VIDEO LOTTERY TERMINALGAMBLING AND ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING INRURAL NEWFOUNDLANDReade Davis aa Department of Anthropology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's,Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2006To cite this Article: Davis, Reade (2006) 'ALL OR NOTHING: VIDEO LOTTERYTERMINAL GAMBLING AND ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING IN RURALNEWFOUNDLAND', Identities, 13:4, 503 - 531

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 13:503–531, 2006Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10702890600995405

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All or Nothing: Video Lottery Terminal Gambling and Economic Restructuring in Rural Newfoundland

Reade DavisDepartment of Anthropology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

The sudden collapse of the cod fishery off Canada’s east coast in the early 1990sdirectly affected the livelihoods of more than 30,000 fishers and fish-processing plantworkers in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In response to the crisis, thefederal government closed the fishery and introduced a series of adjustment programswith the aim of reducing capacity in the industry and encouraging displaced people toseek employment elsewhere. This article examines how a small group of people livingin a fishery-dependent region on the east coast of Newfoundland began using free-spending video lottery terminal gambling as a way to engage with these efforts todownsize and restructure their industry. Despite the personal and financial strainsthat regular gambling often created, the communal spending associated with itbecame a way in which some people sought to affirm local ties and critique neoliberaladjustment programs designed to encourage mobility, personal ambition, and soundfinancial management. The power of this critique was, however, contingent on thecapacity of the core players to continue to define their behaviour as an exercise in soli-darity. This idea was perpetually undermined by government programs and mediastories, which presented heavy gambling as an individual weakness or addiction, andby the increasing social stratification that accompanied the restructuring of the fish-ing industry, making the disparities between gamblers much more difficult to hide.

Key Words: gambling, public policy, Newfoundland, Canada

Over the last two decades, policy reforms in many of the world’s mostaffluent countries have led to sweeping government cutbacks and a grow-ing emphasis on the creation of economic efficiencies through market-based approaches to program development and financing (Dean andHindness 1998; Savoie 1999; Clarke 2001). This, in turn, has led to a bur-geoning interest in developing new modes of governance through whichstates can continue to influence the decision making of citizens withouthaving to absorb the degree of economic and political risk that was typicalof the “welfare state” era. One key strategy has been the growing applica-tion of participatory management techniques borrowed from the privatesector, both within government and in dealings with citizens.1

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Wendy Brown has pointed out that this new approach to governingis typified by “the active promotion of institutions, policies, and dis-courses which normatively construct individuals as calculating, entre-preneurial selves who rationally deliberate about alternative coursesof action, make choices, and bear responsibility for the consequencesof these choices” (Brown 2003: 5–6). Similarly, Hansen and Salskov-Iversen observe that, in recent years, there have been growing effortson the part of government agencies to construct political subjects as“empowered, risk-taking, entrepreneurs” (2002: 4).2 The state ceasesto act as a “provider” of services and a bearer of risk and insteadbecomes a “facilitator” or “partner,” providing subjects with a range ofavailable options and inviting them to participate in decision making,but expecting them to assume the risks associated with whatever deci-sions they make (Hansen and Salskov-Iversen 2002: 15).3

Although this discourse has become increasingly hegemonic inrecent years, an ever-growing ethnographic literature has helped toillustrate that attempts to govern rarely go uncontested and to high-light the disjunctures between discourse and practice that oftenbecome apparent when particular social contexts are examined closely(Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995; Cooke and Kothari 2001). JamesFerguson has observed that while various governance projects mayshare “important commonalities at the level of discourse, planning,and program elements,” they are not likely to produce “standardizedeffects” (1990: 260). In practice, policy implementation occurs within alandscape of other historical and cultural trajectories, and the conver-gence between these trends may offer a space for alternative mean-ings to emerge. This insight builds on the earlier findings of Williams(1982), Wolf (1982), Roseberry (1983), and Sider (1986) that large-scale political and economic processes shape the ways in which peoplemake sense of the worlds in which they live, but tend to do so in his-torically and culturally specific ways.4

These arguments underscore the importance of examining the waysin which people in a variety of locales are responding to radical social,economic, and environmental restructuring in their day-to-day lives. Icontribute to this discussion through an examination of the efforts ofsome people living on the east coast of Newfoundland to use high-stakes video lottery terminal (VLT) gambling as a way of engagingcollectively with a large-scale fishery-restructuring program thatsought to compensate for the sudden collapse of cod stocks by promot-ing personal ambition, geographical mobility, and sound financialmanagement.

Although the behaviour of these persons was not typical of all VLTplayers, they were somewhat successful in using the games as a

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All or Nothing in Rural Newfoundland 505

vehicle through which to generate new collective meanings and identi-ties during a time of rapid social change and uncertainty about thefuture. The solidarity cultivated by these players stood in sharpcontrast to the individuating effects of policies designed to help themto “adjust” to the moratorium by pursuing a new life elsewhere. Thesenewly constructed collective identities proved tremendously fragile,however, as players had to regularly contend with alternative dis-courses that portrayed heavy gambling in a much less positive lightand with growing economic disparities stemming from differentdegrees of access to wealth generated from emerging fisheries foralternate species.

The Newfoundland fishery and the Canadian state

The Grand Banks off Newfoundland have been renowned for theirbountiful cod harvests for more than 500 years. Archaeologists havefound evidence of short-lived European settlements in Newfoundlandfrom as early as 1000 A.D.,5 but it was not until 1497 that GiovanniCaboto (John Cabot) made landfall and formally claimed the island forEngland. Legend has it that codfish were so abundant at that timethat crewmen aboard Caboto’s vessel were able to harvest them inbaskets lowered over the side of the boat. In spite of the British claim,the Grand Banks continued to be fished extensively by French, Portu-guese, Spanish, and Basque crews throughout the sixteenth century(Sider 1986; Pope 1997).

The seasonal fishery proved so productive that year-round British-and French-sponsored colonies were established during the seven-teenth century, despite a harsh climate and a rocky terrain thatseverely limited agricultural production. With the signing of theTreaty of Paris (1783), French territorial claims on the island wereextinguished, and permanent British settlement began to grow rap-idly.6 Newfoundland was officially recognized as a colony in 1825, andthis status persisted until 1855, when Responsible Government wasestablished.

It is not a gross exaggeration to say that during the century thatfollowed, dried and salted Newfoundland cod fed much of the West-ern world. Already a staple in many parts of Western Europe, “saltcod” soon emerged as an inexpensive source of food for slave labour-ers in the Caribbean and Brazil. At that time, the fishery operatedthrough a system of merchant capital. The majority of Newfound-land’s coastal residents participated in family-based fishing enter-prises in small coastal settlements. In most areas, men harvested codby using small boats and stationary technologies such as hooks and

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lines or traps, when the fish migrated into near-shore waters eachsummer. The cod were then cleaned, salted, and dried locally, withall family members playing a part in the curing process. Finally, this“salt fish” was traded to merchants for export. Merchants, in turn,would provide fishers with credit, which could be exchanged forimported food items and manufactured commodities. Most commonamong these were salt, lead weights, nets, flour, tea, and molasses(Sider 1986; Kennedy 1997). Although fishers were typically grantedsignificantly less than market value for their catches, the economiccredit extended by merchants helped most families to surviveresource fluctuations, hard winters, and sporadic shortages (Cadigan1995). In addition to commercial fishing and sealing, people procuredfood through a combination of animal husbandry, the small-scale cul-tivation of root crops, and subsistence fishing, hunting, and gathering(Davis 2000).

Sider has argued that under the merchant system, coastal fishingsettlements retained some degree of autonomy, albeit within a largercontext of domination by distant capital, because they were able toretain “substantial local control over their own social relations of workand daily life” (Sider 2003: 24). He links this to the common propertynature of the fishery resource, which by its very nature could not beeasily “taxed, enclosed, or alienated” (Sider 2003: 91). As a result,fisher families in Newfoundland were able to sell “the product of theirlabor, not their labor itself” (Sider 2003: 91). Sider cautions that theautonomy of salt fish producers was, however, “fundamentally illu-sory” and was made possible only by their relative isolation (Sider2003: 304).

Newfoundland was hit very hard economically by the cost of itsinvolvement in World War I and by the Great Depression that fol-lowed. The market for Newfoundland salt fish declined during thisperiod as well in the face of strong competition from producers inNorway, Iceland, and France (Sider 1986). In 1934, crippled by anenormous debt7 and growing poverty, Newfoundlanders voted to sus-pend their constitution and accept a British-appointed Commission ofGovernment (Long 1999). Commission rule continued until 1948,when Newfoundlanders voted by a narrow margin (52 percent) tobecome the tenth Canadian province. The union was formalized in1949 (Hiller 1998). Although this decision made residents of the newprovince eligible for a range of new social services, such as improvedhealth care, social assistance, unemployment insurance, old age pen-sions, and baby bonuses, it also surrendered full control over the man-agement of fisheries and all other activities in coastal and marinewaters to the Canadian government (Wright 2001).

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All or Nothing in Rural Newfoundland 507

In the 1950s, a new type of vessel came into existence, which wouldrevolutionize fisheries the world over. Technological changes thatemerged during World War II, in combination with an abundance ofinexpensive fossil fuels, prompted the world’s fishing powers todevelop fleets of industrial trawlers, which fished by dragging largenets along the ocean floor. These new boats were capable of followingmigrating schools of fish, and larger vessels were able to continue fish-ing through the winter spawning period. Spurred on by these develop-ments, European, American, and Canadian fleets began to intensifytheir fishing efforts on the Grand Banks (Wright 2001).

The major aim of federal policy following the entry of Newfound-land into Canada in 1949 was to modernize the fishery by encouragingthe development of a fleet of industrial offshore trawlers and midshore“long liners” and discouraging the small-boat inshore fishery (Sinclair1985; Sider 2003). Under the guidance of the newly elected Newfound-land Premier Joseph R. Smallwood, a strong proponent of Confedera-tion with Canada, a rural resettlement program was undertaken tomove people away from the inshore fishery and reduce the cost of pro-viding government services. Between 1946 and 1975, more than 300small “outport”8 communities were forcibly resettled into larger cen-tres, resulting in the relocation of at least 28,000 people (MaritimeHistory Archive 2004). During his nearly three decades as premier,Smallwood was also responsible for enacting laws to restrict subsis-tence activities and for securing capital to assist with the developmentof a variety of manufacturing businesses in rural Newfoundland. Mostof these ventures quickly went bankrupt in part because of their lackof proximity to export markets and suppliers of raw materials (House1998). Despite these failed enterprises, numerous jobs were created inthe decades that followed Confederation. The significant increase incatch size that accompanied the introduction of trawlers, in combina-tion with the rising international demand for fresh rather than saltedfish, and growing pressure to create wage labour opportunities inrural Newfoundland led to the construction of new fish-processingplants in many centres across the island throughout the 1960s and1970s (Cadigan 2001; Sider 2003).

By 1977 concerns about overfishing by foreign trawlers on theGrand Banks and the prospect of discovering new deep-sea petroleumand mineral deposits prompted Canada to extend its exclusive eco-nomic zone to include all waters within 200 nautical miles of its coast-line (Wright 2001).9 During the same year, the Department of Fisheriesand Oceans (DFO) was created by the Canadian federal government,with the stated goal of applying “rational scientific management” to thefishery (McCay and Finlayson 1995: 9). In Newfoundland, production

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508 R. Davis

was expanded significantly on the wave of optimism that was stimu-lated by the extension of the offshore boundary (Felt and Locke 1995).During this period, Canadian cod harvests soared, leading to the con-struction of new processing plants in small towns across the island.This created an economic boom, enabling unprecedented numbers ofpeople to find jobs and fuelling consumption on a scale never beforethought possible (Sider 1986). It was also responsible for the entry ofmany women into the wage labour force for the first time, althoughthey tended to occupy lower status positions than their male counter-parts (Neis 1999).

The Cod moratorium and its consequences

By the end of the 1980s, inshore fishers in many parts of Atlantic Canadahad begun to experience a marked decline in the size of their codharvests. Despite their complaints, little was done to alter the courseof federal fisheries policy. By the early 1990s dwindling catches werebecoming apparent in the offshore trawler fishery as well, and in 1992the federal government decided to close down the cod fishery in manyareas for two years to give stocks time to recover (Finlayson 1994).Further closures in other areas followed a year later. To compensatethe more than 30,000 fishers and processing plant workers in New-foundland and Labrador who had been directly affected by the closure,along with 10,000 more living in other parts of Atlantic Canada, thegovernment announced the “Northern Cod Adjustment and RecoveryProgram” (NCARP) in 1992 and the Atlantic Groundfish AdjustmentProgram (AGAP) in 1993. The programs were intended to provideshort-term income support and offer retraining programs for thoseindividuals willing to move into new professions (Woodrow 1996).Attendance in these retraining programs was not compulsory, how-ever, and they did not attract as many people as had been anticipated(Davis 2000).

By 1994, when cod stocks had shown no signs of rebounding, themoratorium was extended indefinitely. NCARP and AGAP werereplaced by a five-year, 1.9 billion dollar restructuring program called“The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy” or TAGS (Millich 1999). The“active programming” approach of TAGS was outlined in a brochureentitled “Helping People Help Themselves,” which was widely distrib-uted to affected individuals in May of 1994 (Human Resources Devel-opment Canada 1994). TAGS was a more aggressive attempt to movepeople out of the fishing industry and prepare them to compete in a“diversified and changing labour market” (Human Resources Develop-ment Canada 1994). Regular income support was committed for

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All or Nothing in Rural Newfoundland 509

between two and five years, depending on an individual’s years ofexperience and degree of dependence on cod.10 This time, however,payments were made contingent on the agreement of workers to “par-ticipate actively” in labour market adjustment programs (HumanResources Development Canada 1994).

The labour market adjustment component of TAGS consisted ofmeasures to provide individuals with “career planning and counsel-ling; mobility assistance and support for re-employment; measures toprepare individuals for work such as literacy and basic skills training;and measures to enhance employment opportunities such as supportfor entrepreneurship, restoration of the environment and other com-munity activities” (Human Resources Development Canada 1994).TAGS recipients were expected to meet with a career planning andemployment counsellor to help them to “assess individual employmentpossibilities, set goals and develop individual action plans” (HumanResources Development Canada 1994). They were also encouraged totake part in a career development program called “Improving YourOdds,” which offered a variety of eight-week training courses in ruralcommunities. The courses available varied by region, but commonoptions included carpentry, hair styling, small engine repair, tailor-ing, leadership, and entrepreneurship. TAGS recipients could alsoreceive some support if they decided to enrol in college or universityprograms or complete their high school diplomas. Finally, the programprovided incentives for people who were willing to move to more pros-perous provinces in search of work by offering short-term financialassistance to partially offset the cost of “seeking work, house-huntingand permanent relocation” (Human Resources Development Canada1994).

Rather than working to create new permanent jobs in rural areas,as had been the case in the Smallwood era, TAGS left it up to the dis-placed workers themselves to assess the labour market and choosean appropriate path. It did not dictate what they should do, butrather provided each affected individual with counselling and educa-tional opportunities, and used additional monetary incentives toreward them for displaying individual initiative and a willingness torelocate. The program was designed to make people see themselvesas enterprising and transformative selves who were capable ofchanging occupations, educational levels, “skill sets” and homes ifnecessary to adapt to the fishery crisis. At the same time, however,TAGS clients were expected to absorb greater responsibility for theirown financial futures. It was made clear that TAGS would be thefinal buyout package for the industry and no further assistancewould be provided.11

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TAGS was strongly criticized for encouraging people to move awayto find employment and not working harder to create jobs in ruralareas. Several studies conducted after the declaration of the morato-rium reported that it was common for rural Newfoundlanders toblame the federal government for the collapse of the cod stocks, andmany fishery workers resented the fact that they were being asked topay the price for the mistakes of distant managers (Steele, Andersen,and Green 1992; Finlayson 1994; Palmer 1995; Woodrow 1996;Palmer and Sinclair 1997). The government-supported push towardindustrialization and overcapitalization in the fisheries was often pre-sented as the major cause of the problem.12 Another source of hostilityamong many small boat fishers was the unwillingness of Departmentof Fisheries and Oceans managers to seek input from small-scaleregional fishing operations in conducting their stock assessments.Instead, the department had relied almost exclusively on informationobtained from large offshore fishing and processing companies, whichcould be easily incorporated into existing statistical models (Finlayson1994; Neis, Ripley, and Hutchings 1995).

Despite this opposition, the announcement of the TAGS programappears to have been successful in prompting some people to moveaway. Between 1991 and 1996, the population in the regional censusdistrict where I did my fieldwork fell by six percent. About two-thirds of the migrants were between the ages of nineteen andtwenty-nine. Levels of migration in some districts of the provincewere considerably higher, with some areas experiencing emigrationrates of over thirty percent during the same period (StatisticsCanada 1992, 1999). Still, the number of people opting to move wasconsiderably smaller than had been anticipated. The designers of theprogram appear to have underestimated the strong incentives thatpeople had to remain in their home communities. Most of thoseemployed in the fishery were in their late thirties, forties, and fifties;had a limited amount of formal education and few transferable jobskills; owned their own homes; had school-age children; and haddeep historical ties to the people, land and seascapes, and traditionsof the area.13 The vast majority of persons employed in the inshorefishery had family connections to the sea that stretched back multi-ple generations. Many saw retraining programs as a farce, becausethey had no intention of moving and, even if they did, they doubtedthey would be able to find satisfying work elsewhere. Of those whotook retraining courses but opted to remain in rural Newfoundland,very few were able to find work in their chosen fields. It is nowwidely joked that in some areas of the province there is a certifiedhairdresser for every ten people.

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Among the more successful transitions brought about during theTAGS era was the move toward fisheries diversification. In theinshore fishery, efforts were made to intensify the harvesting andmarketing of so-called “underutilized species,” such as lobster andcapelin, and to develop new fisheries for species such as lumpfish andsea urchins. The sale of these products made it possible for someinshore harvesters to continue to earn a modest income from fishingduring the moratorium years.

Particularly successful were fishers who held licences for shellfishspecies, such as snow crab and shrimp, which appear to have boomedjust as cod populations dwindled.14 For the most part, these individu-als fished on “longliners,” vessels between thirty-five and sixty-fivefeet in length that are capable of travelling farther offshore and stay-ing at sea for days at a time. By the mid-1990s some inshore fishers(those fishing on vessels under thirty-five feet in length) who satisfiedgovernment licensing criteria were allocated much smaller snow crabquotas so that they could share in this new source of income as well.Because it is more economical for quotas to be caught in as few trips aspossible each season, however, a high proportion of those people whoremained employed in the shellfish-fishing and processing sectorswere without steady work for long stretches of time each year.

Many of those who did not move away in the mid-1990s foundthemselves in a state of ambivalence. Despite the relative shortage oflocal employment, most did not suffer marked declines in the size oftheir incomes. The TAGS program promised that most recipients liv-ing in the region would receive regular biweekly payments for at leastfour years (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador 1997). Forindividuals who were continuing to receive money through theirinvolvement in other fisheries, the economic security afforded by theTAGS era was unprecedented. Many were receiving a predictable sourceof income for the first time in their lives. The problem was that theywere left with no clear answer about when, or even if, the cod fisherywould reopen, and whether they would have a place in it if it did.

The research project

The research that led to this article was carried out over a five-yearperiod, from 1998 to 2003, with intensive fieldwork taking place over aone-year period between 1998 and 1999. This consisted of participantobservation in clubs (bars) and multiple tape-recorded interviews withtwenty-five regular gamblers and seven bartenders. Fieldwork wasconducted in a rural fishery-dependent area located on the east coastof Newfoundland, between two and three hours’ drive of the capital city

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512 R. Davis

of St. John’s. The specific name of the area is being withheld to protectthe identities of the research participants. Although the small-boatinshore cod fishery has long been the primary economic activity in theregion, many residents have historically commuted thirty to forty-fiveminutes each day to work in larger towns, usually as crewmembers onlarger fishing vessels, as labourers in fish processing plants, or asworkers in the small tourism and service sectors. The town where Iwas based housed the only three clubs in the region at the time, andsome patrons had to drive thirty minutes or more to get there.15

The emergence of video lottery terminals

Newfoundland residents have gambled for centuries. Card games ofvarious kinds were played by the island’s earliest European settlers,and this practice continued and expanded in subsequent generations.In addition to card playing, it was common for a Christmas raffle to beheld each year for presents in many communities and, in someregions, the practice of drawing lots for the right to use more desirablefishing grounds had taken hold as well. This longstanding attractionto games of chance in rural Newfoundland may be related to the tre-mendous risk and uncertainty that has always characterized the livesof the people that live there, particularly those engaged in the fishery.Several interviewees described the fishery as a gamble in itself,because it is so dangerous and unpredictable and because a person’scatch and income can fluctuate dramatically from one year to the next.

By the 1950s and 1960s organized card tournaments and bingogames had become very popular among both men and women, and thiswas followed in the 1970s by gambling on dart and pool tournaments.Prior to the 1980s, however, gambling games tended to be locally oper-ated and were restricted to relatively small wagers. This situationchanged with the arrival of Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC) gamesin the region. The ALC, which was co-founded by the provincial gov-ernments of Canada’s four easternmost provinces in 1976, first beganselling lottery tickets to Newfoundlanders in the late 1970s. Over thecourse of the next decade, the ALC expanded into a range of new lotterygames and instant win tickets (Atlantic Lottery Corporation 2004).

With little fanfare, the ALC introduced video lottery terminals(VLTs) into several Newfoundland clubs in December of 1990, makingit the second Canadian province to offer them.16 Over the course of thenext decade, the number of VLTs in the province climbed steadily, asdid the number of establishments that house the machines. After theirintroduction, annual net revenues derived from VLTs in the provincerose dramatically, from $12 million dollars in the 1991–1992 fiscal

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year to $142 million in 2004–2005 (Atlantic Lottery Corporation1992–2004). This striking increase has occurred despite a gradualdecrease in the provincial population over the same period.

Unlike most conventional slot machines, which are self-contained,Newfoundland VLTs are connected to an on-line network. Most oftheir operations are controlled directly from the ALC headquarters inMoncton, New Brunswick. Profits from the machines are dividedbetween the ALC (76.25 percent) and the proprietor of the establish-ment (24.75 percent). The ALC’s profits, after operating expenses, arethen paid to the various provincial governments proportional to theamount spent in each province (Atlantic Lottery Corporation 2004).

The most common type of VLT in Newfoundland at the time ofstudy was known as the “Swinging Bells.” It closely resembles a con-ventional slot machine game, having three rows and three columns.Players win by matching brightly coloured symbols across rows, downcolumns, or along diagonals. Unlike most slot machines, however,VLTs use an electronic bank of credits to issue payments, rather thanthe traditional coin payback system. For the players to redeem theirwinnings, they must first decide to print out a receipt and exchange itfor cash at the bar.

The game also features a variety of special combinations of symbols,which bring about especially large wins. The most significant, not sur-prisingly, is called “The Swinging Bells.” A player “hits the bells” whenhe or she gets a cross of bell symbols down the middle column andacross the middle row of the screen. When this occurs, the animatedbells on the screen swing back and forth and an electronic jingle isplayed. In addition to the payout received for hitting the bells them-selves (usually about triple the value of the bet), the player is alsogiven the opportunity to play in the “fever mode” for ten spins. While“in the fever,” the player hopes to get as many bell symbols as possibleto boost the value of the win. On average, after hitting the bells andgoing through the fever mode, a player can expect to receive a dollaramount that equals approximately 200 times the amount that waswagered. A player betting the maximum of $2.50 per spin wouldexpect to win about $500.

For the most part, players that I spoke with said that the thrill ofwinning and the joy of anticipating big wins were among their pri-mary reasons for playing VLTs. This sentiment was articulated byPaul, a forty-year-old fisherman, who had taken to playing the gamesregularly during the moratorium:

Your heart rate speeds up when you hit the bells and you know rightaway that you’re going to get three or four hundred bucks. Your heart is

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pumping. It’s wonderful when you win a bit of money and you know thatyou have the chance to win more. That’s exciting. Then it’s a bit of anadventure. I was first attracted to the machines because they gave methis great response.

Most said that although they found big wins to be deeply exhilarating,even games that did not result in large wins could be enjoyable,provided that they offered a high degree of drama and excitement anddid not take all of their money too quickly.

It was also common for players to say that playing VLTs was aneffective way to distract themselves from their worries about thefuture or other problems they were struggling with in their lives.Because they found the games to be so engaging, some had taken toplaying when they were in a bad mood as a way of changing their stateof mind. Rebecca, a thirty-four-year-old fish-processing plant worker,explained:

Sometimes you’ve just got to have something to drift away into. Think-ing about the game clears my mind. All your troubles disappear whileyou’re playing. It calms you because it distracts you. It takes your atten-tion away from your troubles and puts it onto the game.

Although the tremendous attraction that many players felt towardthe machines themselves cannot be understated, it is also importantto recognize that VLTs are the heir to a much longer tradition ofsocializing in clubs, a practice that took on an added significance dur-ing the moratorium. The first clubs in rural Newfoundland openedduring the 1970s and 1980s, under conditions of widespread seasonalunemployment and the gradual shift away from subsistence produc-tion. Many of the new establishments immediately prospered, reapingthe benefits of the employment boom brought by newly constructedprocessing plants and the disposable income that followed. Althoughsummers continued to be extremely busy, many people began strug-gling to find enough activities to keep themselves occupied though thelong winter off-season.17 Clubs were able to capitalize by offering acontinually expanding range of leisure activities. Over the last thirtyyears, they have emerged as the place for celebrating birthdays, wed-ding receptions, good news, paydays, or just the company of goodfriends. In the absence of easily accessible banks and instant tellermachines, they are also the most convenient way of cashing paychecksin many areas.

For some people, clubs provided a sense of continuity. Many peoplein their thirties and forties had patronized clubs for most of their

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adult lives. It is, therefore, not altogether surprising that when manyof these people were left with more time on their hands and a tremen-dous amount of uncertainty about what the future would bring, clubsand gambling assumed an even greater importance. Because mostreceived their TAGS checks at the same time, those days came to bevery popular times to meet up at the club. Doing so provided an oppor-tunity for people to get out of the house, share information, and talkabout their problems with others who were experiencing similar situa-tions. For many, going to the club to gamble with friends was a wel-come alternative to staying home and watching television.18

VLT gambling as an engagement with economic restructuring

VLT gambling achieved widespread general popularity during thefirst few years of the moratorium. Many of those interviewed said thatthe novelty of the machines prompted people from a range of age andincome groups to try them. For the most part, however, wagers tendedto be fairly low. Although a few players with modest incomes wouldsometimes gamble in the hope of getting a big win that would stretchtheir paychecks farther, most would simply play for entertainmentwhen they were already at the club, with little expectation of makingmoney in the long run.

Gambling on the machines soon came to occupy a much more signif-icant role in the lives of certain people in the study area. About thirtypeople took to playing the machines much more often and with muchlarger expenditures than most others. These players drew a concep-tual distinction between themselves and other players who did notgamble as heavily. Although not all of the heavier players were closefriends, most had taken to referring to the group by a distinct term“The Gamblers.”

This core group was divided fairly evenly between men and women,although it was much more common for men to come to the club togamble by themselves. The self-identified Gamblers interviewedranged in age between twenty-five and seventy-seven: most clusteredclosely around the average age of thirty-five. Of the twenty-five play-ers interviewed, seventy-two percent were between the ages of thirtyand fifty, and thirty-two percent were between thirty-five and thirty-nine. By contrast, only sixteen percent were in their twenties, andtwelve percent were over the age of fifty. Most had worked in theinshore fishery or in processing plants at some point in their lives, andmany were receiving their final TAGS payments when this study com-menced in 1998.19 For the most part, the core group of Gamblerswould be classified as middle or working class by the standards of the

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region, having modest but regular incomes. Many of those who hadqualified for TAGS were, however, very concerned about how theywould be able to continue living in the region after compensation pay-ments ended.

Those who identified themselves as Gamblers adhered to a numberof customs that ensured that most, if not all, of their winnings wouldbe disposed of while at the club. One widely recognized practice wasthat those who hit the Swinging Bells were expected to buy a round ofdrinks for the house. This generosity was even expected when the costof the round exceeded the value of the jackpot and in situations inwhich the player had spent more than the value of the jackpot to winit. Sometimes, the munificence of big winners extended beyond the ini-tial round of drinks. A few players would routinely devote theirremaining spoils to buying fast food, cases of beer, or any number ofother disposable gratifications for themselves and their cohorts.Although the importance of this custom was rarely explicitly stated,the buying of rounds was one of the most important distinctionsbetween occasional players and those who were recognized as part ofthe group. Many spoke disdainfully about the greed of players who hadnot bought a round after hitting the Swinging Bells, particularly if theyhad been willing to take advantage of the generosity of others. Thisresentment often persisted for years after the incident had occurred.

Some players made a practice of giving money to others when theyhad won a large amount. These donations were usually made with noimmediate expectation of being paid back. Earl, a forty-four-year-oldfisherman, explained:

Here, lately, I’ve been on a pretty good roll. Then again, no matter howmany times you hit the bells, you’ve got a tendency to spend the money.Like, for instance, I hit the bells last night and the first thing I did wasloan out some money to the boys, because they had no money to go to theclub. If I get it back, that’s great, but if not, who cares? It’s only bellmoney. I’m after winning millions … and spending millions too.

One frequent donor would routinely ask the bartender to give her allof her winnings in five-dollar bills. She would then place the bills onher machine and allow her gambling friends to draw freely from thepile. On occasions where several regulars had won large sums ofmoney, it was not uncommon for so many bills to be passed aroundthat it became virtually impossible to keep track of who owned what.

It was also quite common for players to encourage each other to betthe maximum amount of $2.50 per spin. Although high bets occasion-ally resulted in very large wins, they also had the potential to use up

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credits very quickly. On some occasions, several players would agreeto bet the maximum at the same time, in the hope that one would geta big payoff. Many of the heaviest spenders seemed to take pride intheir willingness to bet, and often lose, large sums of money withoutshowing signs of panic. Jane, a thirty-nine-year-old former plantworker and self-identified Gambler commented:

If there’s one thing that defines our group it’s being willing to spendmoney. You have to show no concern for money, even though you’reprobably freaking inside. It used to be how much we could win, but nowit’s how much we can lose. Everybody gathers around the machine justto watch you. It’s like it’s expected for you to keep up the pace. We’re thebig guys. We’re expected to go in and gamble heavily and lose heavily,and we don’t ever want to disappoint anybody.

Many of the regulars expressed open disapproval toward people whobet small amounts, especially when there were others waiting for afree machine.

Although not all members of the core group of gamblers acknowl-edged that their free-spending behaviour had political implications,many did speak about it as a way of counteracting the individuatingeffects of the cod moratorium and the TAGS program. Jane explained:

I think that a great sense of depression fell on all the communitiesaround here, because a traditional way of life that had gone on for centu-ries was taken away. There was nothing left to be proud of. There is nocontinuity now. We absolutely do not know what is coming next. Noth-ing is in our control anymore. This is a way to keep some control andsome continuity, with the clubs and the gambling. It is connectedbecause it is the only way to hang onto something we have lived with allour lives, and risk is the number one factor. All we live by is risk.

Many people resented the fact that TAGS was designed to encouragethem to make dramatic life changes, while seemingly giving little consid-eration to other people in their lives that would be affected by their deci-sions, such as children, aging parents, and close friends. Choosing togamble regularly tended to leave people with considerably less money,but some felt as though doing so provided them with a form of power.Instead of simply accepting their fate, as many others had done, they sawthemselves as taking an active stance. By gambling with TAGS moneyand spending winnings collectively, instead of using the program to pur-sue a new life elsewhere, they asserted a commitment to the here andnow. Gambling became a way of affirming local connections and privileg-ing interpersonal relationships rather than individual ambition.

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For many players, the VLT came to be viewed as an extension of thegovernment. For the most part, however, members of the core groupdid not draw a distinction between the provincial government, the fed-eral government, and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, instead refer-ring to them all under the general label “the government.” Twoplayers noted that VLTs were a means of diverting federal TAGSmoney into provincial government coffers, but most speculated that itwas the same government body trying to get back the money it hadspent on TAGS payments. Earl explained:

The government is happy, because as long as you are on them machines,you’re not breaking the law. You’re not out tryin’ to get more fish, andyou’re paying back to them the money they gave you.

In the minds of many players, winning was important, not strictlybecause of the material or emotional rewards it provided but becauseit gave them the sense that they had held their nerve and beaten thesystem, even if they knew they could not do so in the long run.Because many people in the core group had become close friends andwinnings were usually shared, most of the self-identified Gamblershad developed a team sentiment and were emotionally invested ineach other’s successes and failures. It was not uncommon for playersto gather around a machine to cheer on those who were doing well, tojeer the machine when it failed to cooperate, or to consol each otherafter a particularly expensive loss.

Perhaps because players rarely came out ahead in the end, somewould turn to other methods of expressing their antagonism toward amachine. The most common reaction was to bombard the VLT withinsults and profanities, but some resorted to overt acts of violence aswell, such as kicking the base of the machine, slamming fists down onthe play buttons, punching the screen, or lifting the machine up onone end and dropping it back down again.20 One former fisherman wasremembered for having tried to carry a machine out of the club on oneoccasion, but he was stopped before he got very far. He vowed that ifhe ever won the lottery, he would buy a mallet and drive up and downthe coast, smashing every VLT he could find.21 Although such actionswere much more common among men, a few women in the core groupwere prone to violent outbursts as well.

There is a long tradition within the social sciences of viewing gam-bling as a form of symbolic resistance against authority or societalnorms (Zola 1963; Herman 1967; Devereaux 1980 [1949]; Apt, Smith,and Christiansen 1985; Smith 1996). Many have taken the view thatthe central appeal of the free spending associated with gambling is

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that it enables persons who are at the mercy of social and economicforces beyond their control to feel, if only for a fleeting moment, thatthey have some control over their fate or at least that it is not prede-termined. Building on these arguments, several anthropologists havepointed out that gambling can also be a means through which peopleliving in marginalized regions seek to generate new collective mean-ings and assert their independence from government policies(MacLean 1984; Mitchell 1988; Papataxiarchis 1999).

In the broader literature on symbolic resistance, however, there ismuch research that has cautioned against the tendency to present actsof collective defiance against authority as internally consistent andeffective political projects.22 Ethnographers, in particular, haveattempted to show how particular sets of actions and meanings cometo be defined as resistance and the ways in which this definition isnegotiated and contested (Kondo 1990; Abu-Lughod 1990; Keesing1992; Hale 1994). Dorinne Kondo notes that “people inevitably partici-pate in their own oppressions, buying into hegemonic ideologies evenas they struggle against those oppressions and those ideologies…”(1990: 221). She stresses the need to recognize that such movementsare rarely straightforward, and are always undercut by “multiplici-ties,” “tensions,” and “layerings of meaning” (1990: 221). Similarly,Roger Keesing cautions that “What appears as a collective stance…may hide a multitude of private, diverse, and more complex ‘tran-scripts’” (1992: 217).23

This soon proved apparent in the case of “The Gamblers,” as grow-ing class divisions produced by increasing income disparities began togradually undermine the discourse of solidarity in the face of adver-sity that had been articulated by members of the core group. When Ireturned to the region in June of 1998, most TAGS recipients werebracing for the end of compensation payments. Stock assessments con-tinued to point to a perilously low cod population, and all evidenceindicated that the cod fishery was unlikely to be reopened any timesoon. Although most heavy gamblers saw this as cause for great con-cern, many fishers were buffered by the surprising economic success ofthe snow crab fishery. The disappointing harvests experienced by com-petitors in Alaska during the mid- to late 1990s led to high prices andprompted the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to authorize amajor increase in harvesting effort.

Despite the significant debt loads that many vessel owners carried,the crab fishery soon began to bring in much higher incomes thanmost fishers had ever experienced before. In addition, because the vastmajority of these individuals had fished for cod previously, most hadalso qualified for the full five years of TAGS payments. Some also

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received additional lump sum payments through the “Canadian Fish-eries Adjustment and Restructuring Plan,” which was announcedafter the TAGS program had run its course. Although many fishersthat I spoke to expressed concern that snow crab populations werebeing harvested at unsustainable levels and could soon go the way ofcod,24 many took advantage of their newfound prosperity to add addi-tions to their homes or to purchase new trucks or snowmobiles. It alsohelped to drive continuing interest in clubs, VLTs, and other pastimes.

Although this resurgence in the fishery was also responsible forreviving a number of processing jobs in the region, the labour requiredto process new species was far less than was needed in the 1970s and1980s, when the cod fishery was at its peak. In addition, the risingCanadian dollar and high cost of energy has contributed to an increas-ing tendency to outsource secondary processing of many fish and shell-fish species to China, where labour costs are much lower. Accordingly,it is safe to say that most of the local economic benefits derived fromsnow crab and shrimp were restricted to vessel owners who ownedcrab licences, along with their crew members and families, and to pro-cessing companies, many of which also hold a stake in seafood distri-bution networks.

The end of the TAGS program was particularly difficult for manywomen who had worked in processing plants. Plant workers tended toreceive only three or four years’ worth of compensation payments, andmany had a difficult time finding regular work after the paymentsstopped. Similar problems were experienced by those inshore fisherswho, for one reason or another, were denied access to the crab fishery.For those families who were unable to capitalize on the crab bounty,the end of the TAGS program brought about significant reductions inincome. In addition, employment insurance reforms, which were intro-duced by the federal government in the late 1990s, made it harder forplant workers and other low-income seasonal workers to qualify forwinter compensation payments. This contributed to a striking rise inthe number of people who were opting to move away on a temporary orseasonal basis to look for work in mainland Canada.

Sider has argued that the economic restructuring that occurred inthe aftermath of the cod moratorium, and the glaring inequalities thatfollowed, brought about a “crisis of social reproduction” in rural fish-ing communities (2003: 312). The cultural and material continuity ofthese places has been gradually undermined by a political and eco-nomic system that is literally pulling families and communities apart,through widening class divisions, longer trips at sea, and the chronicexporting of people of working age. In this new predicament, Sidersuggests that: “… people must live across, and often simultaneously

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against, the ruptures between their present situation and their pastvalues, their past social relations, their own culture” (Sider 2003: 57,emphasis in original).

As the TAGS program neared its end, many of the core players werebeginning to find it very difficult to keep up with the spending of oth-ers in the group. While the customs that had come to be associatedwith VLTs were not particularly problematic when these individualswere enjoying the economic stability provided by TAGS, the end ofregular payments forced many to reconsider the amount of money thatthey could afford to devote to gambling. Most were facing a variety ofnon-economic pressures to cut down as well, such as persistent criti-cism from family and friends.

By the end of 1998 several players had begun making concertedefforts to set limits on their spending or avoid playing the machinesaltogether. Having developed reputations as big spenders, however,most found it difficult to redefine their identities within the context ofthe club. This was made abundantly clear to Jane. After having beenone of the heaviest spenders, she concluded that she needed to cutdown when she began experiencing credit problems and was unable toafford new school clothes for her children. In practice, she had greatdifficulty convincing her friends that she could no longer spend asheavily.

Lately, I have been trying to just spend the money I had set aside andthen leave, but most people won’t let you off that easy. They try to stopyou from leaving. They lend you money and everything. They just don’twant you to go. It’s madness.

Eventually, Jane was forced to stop going to the club altogether,because she found herself unable to moderate her spending. This wasa source of great frustration for her, however, because it meant break-ing ties with many of her closest friends. When interviewed again fourmonths later, Jane had just completed her sixth week of completeabstinence. When asked about her decision to quit playing, sheexplained:

I really warred and struggled with myself to stop, and it doesn’t matterwhat anybody thinks, I’ve stopped. But it hurts. I’m not part of a circleanymore. There’s just nothing anybody else is involved in here. Youknow, the only thing that’s left is the community occupation, full-timegamblers. Quitting is really difficult because you have to give up your tieto this wonderful group of people. You see, we’ve all stuck togetherthrough thick and thin. You hate to have to say ‘Look, I’m quitting,’because then you’re a quitter in that respect. And once you’re shunned

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by the crowd that drinks and gambles, you just don’t have an in any-more. I know because I’ve done it.

Several other players shared Jane’s desire to quit, but they found itvery difficult to stay away from the machines.

One way in which some self-identified Gamblers sought to come toterms with their inability to cut down was by adopting the concept ofgambling addiction. The emergence of the addiction paradigm in theregion appears to have been brought about by a flood of stories about theaddictive properties of VLTs in the national and provincial media and bya small public awareness campaign undertaken by the provincial gov-ernment’s Addiction Services division in 1998. Prior to that point, it wasmuch less common for individuals to explain their tendencies to spendtoo much money as being symptomatic of an underlying sickness.

This new conceptualization follows an epistemological shift thathas occurred on an international scale over the past three decadestoward viewing heavy gambling as a disease, rather than as a sin orvice, as had been previously argued (Rosencrance 1985; Rose 1988).Many have argued that “medicalization” has the effect of individualiz-ing responsibility and diverting attention away from the social struc-tures that contribute to particular patterns of behaviour (Conrad andSchneider 1980; Toby 1998).

The strongest advocate of the medical model is Gambler’s Anony-mous (GA), an internationally established support group for personswishing to stop gambling, which emerged out of Alcoholics Anony-mous. The GA doctrine takes the position that “compulsive” gambling“is an illness, progressive in its nature, which can be arrested butnever cured” (Gambler’s Anonymous 1996: 8). Those suffering fromthis illness must accept that they are “very sick people” who are “pow-erless over gambling” and can have no hope of ever being able to “gam-ble normally again” (Gambler’s Anonymous 1996: 4, 8, 13). Thus, theonly conceivable goal is complete abstinence from all forms of gam-bling. The successful lobbying of GA and other proponents of the med-ical model resulted in the inclusion of “pathological gambling” in theAmerican Psychiatric Association’s DSM III in 1980 (American Psy-chiatric Association 1980).25

Tim, a college student who lived in a nearby town, made oneattempt to organize a Gambler’s Anonymous chapter in the area in1998, but he was persuaded to give up after a few months, when hebegan to receive threats from people who resented his efforts.

I had to give up on Gambler’s Anonymous after a while. Seriously, I wasexpecting to get beaten up one night. This one night, a guy came right

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up into my face. He was just an inch away from me and he said ‘My busi-ness is my business. Who the hell are you shoving your face in my busi-ness?’ I told him that I never told him he had to go, but that didn’t holdwater. He took it as a personal attack. At the time, I only had two otherguys going regularly anyway, so that was enough for me to say ‘Enoughof this crap.’

In adopting the concept of addiction to explain their heavy spending,Tim and other self-professed “addicts” contradicted the more positivediscourse that had initially been associated with The Gamblers. Thiswas clearly taken as a threat by some of the others, who continued tospend heavily.

Conclusion

New forms of market-based governance that are characteristic of neolib-eralism demand the active participation of political subjects and dependheavily on their capacity to gain “emotional buy-in” from both public ser-vants and citizens (Hansen and Salskov-Iversen 2002: 16). The TAGSprogram can be understood as a kind of bridge between this newapproach and earlier welfare state era policies. Although TAGS did com-mit to several years of financial support, it was explicitly designed topersuade people to abandon the lives they had known before and accepta changing economic, political, and ecological reality.

During the first four years of the program, one way in which somepeople engaged with this new vision was through a heightened com-mitment to the heavy gambling scene at the local club. The norms ofthis group parodied the ethos that displaced workers were being askedto embrace. The Gamblers refused to become forward-looking plan-ners. Instead, they committed to the lives they had and the peoplethey knew and constructed new collective meanings, in the hope thatfate, or the state, would intervene if their situation took a turn for theworse. This vision harkened back to an earlier time, when people hadgrown accustomed to a more interventionist state, which, althoughmore authoritarian in its approach to policy implementation, wasexpected to assume some responsibility for the survival of rural liveli-hoods and collectivities in times of economic or environmental crisis.

The argument that regular gambling on VLTs was a self-consciousresponse to the individuating pressures created by the cod morato-rium and the TAGS program was contingent on the capacity of keyplayers to continue defining their gambling in a way that was consis-tent with that claim. In the early years of the moratorium, the successof some members of the core group in presenting their gambling as an

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exercise in solidarity depended on their capacity to downplay the divi-sions that existed between them and present themselves as being allin the same boat. Mounting social and economic pressures and grow-ing income disparities made this increasingly difficult to do. The oppo-sition that Jane, Tim, and others like them encountered in theirefforts to quit suggests that doing so represented a challenge to thediscourse forged by the core group. The idea that heavy gambling is anaddiction seemed particularly difficult to accept, because this para-digm characterized heavy gambling as an individual problem. Thisworked to undermine the collective identity that many of the coreplayers had sought to construct as an alternative to the “individualaction plans” advocated by the TAGS program.

As this case demonstrates, claims that particular practices are pro-tests against government or corporate policies can be profoundlyunstable and may require a great deal of effort to maintain. The iden-tity categories on which such interpretations are based are not fixedand unchanging, but deeply contextual, and often subject to a varietyof other social and economic forces. It is imperative that analysts,practitioners, and activists acknowledge the existence of these ten-sions and resist the temptation to uniformly glorify or condemn thesepractices in ways that fail to do justice to the ongoing struggles ofthose involved in them.

Coda

Almost eight years after the initial part of this research was completed,fishery workers in this and many other parts of rural Newfoundland con-tinue to live with tremendous uncertainty about the future. The provinceas a whole has benefited economically from the continued emergence ofthe offshore oil and gas industry and the prospect of future mining andhydroelectric megaprojects. The economic boost provided by these devel-opments has been largely restricted to the capital city of St. John’s, how-ever, and benefits have not been widely shared with coastalcommunities. In 2005 and 2006, rural areas in the province were furtherdestabilized by plummeting snow crab prices, cuts to crab quotas, andextensive layoffs in the fish-processing and pulp and paper industries.This has contributed to a striking rise in rates of emigration in manyparts of the province.

In this precarious climate, the issue of VLT gambling has understand-ably received considerably more attention from the provincial govern-ment. Although a high profile campaign by one Member of the House ofAssembly to have the machines banned outright was unsuccessful, theprovince has recently introduced mandatory warnings on VLTs and

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launched a high-profile advertising campaign to inform people of thepotential hazards of gambling. Despite these changes, however, spend-ing on VLTs in the province has continued to climb steadily, as it has ineach of the fifteen years since the machines were first introduced.

Notes

Received 28 March 2005; accepted 26 July 2006.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the AmericanAnthropological Association in Washington, D.C. in November, 2001. I would like tothank the research participants for their willingness to share their experiences andDr. Sharon Roseman for her invaluable comments on several versions of this paper.Research funding was provided by the Institute of Social and Economic Research atMemorial University of Newfoundland.

Address correspondence to Reade Davis, Department of Anthropology, Memorial Uni-versity of Newfoundland, St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada A1C5S7.E-mail: [email protected]

1. This trend is evidenced by the growing influence of the “new public management” lit-erature in recent years (Dunleavy and Hood 1994; Savoie 1995; Aucoin 1995; Peters1998).

2. Related arguments have been made by Deleuze (1990), Clarke and Newman (1997),Bourdieu (1998), Rose (1999), and Jessop (2002).

3. Despite these insights, it is important to remember that the state is not a homoge-neous entity with a unified agenda. Rather, the state is better conceived of as a site ofstruggle, where complex networks of ideas and agendas converge (Schneider andSchneider 1998; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Roseman 1996, 2004).

4. This perspective stands in stark contrast to approaches that treat cultures as discreteentities and focus largely on shared meanings and symbolic systems without fullyconsidering the ways in which historical forces and relations of power have shapedpresent circumstances (Roseberry 1989).

5. Around 1000 A.D., a Norse settlement persisted at l’Anse aux Meadows on the north-ernmost point of the island for about ten years before eventually being abandoned,probably because of harsh winters and violent encounters with indigenous peoples. Inaddition, a seasonal Basque whaling and fishing station dating from the 1520s hasbeen unearthed at Red Bay in southern Labrador.

6. Under the terms of the Treaty, the French kept St. Pierre and Miquelon, a smallarchipelago off Newfoundland’s south coast. They also retained the right to fish offNewfoundland’s west coast, a claim that persisted until the early part of the twenti-eth century.

7. This debt was largely a consequence of having to borrow money to pay for the Wareffort, as well as to finance the construction of a railroad across the island at the turnof the century to provide access to the timber and mineral resources of the interior(Webb 2001).

8. The term “outport” is used in Newfoundland to refer to small coastal communities.The Dictionary of Newfoundland English defines it as “a coastal settlement otherthan the chief port of St John’s” (Story, Kirwin, and Widdowson 1990: 363)

9. This followed earlier moves by the governments of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Iceland(Caddy and Cochrane 2001).

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10. Most experienced workers in eastern Newfoundland qualified for between four andfive years of payments because of the region’s heavy reliance on the cod fishery.

11. Despite this warning, the Fish, Food, and Allied Workers (FFAW) union was even-tually successful in pressuring the federal government to create the “CanadianFisheries Adjustment and Restructuring Plan” in 1998. The plan offered a series ofadditional lump sum payments to displaced fishers who had been severely affectedby the closure. Processing plant workers did not qualify.

12. Many inshore fishers complained that large fishing and processing companies, suchas Fisheries Products International and National Sea Products, with their extensiveuse of offshore trawlers, were responsible for the collapse because they fished duringthe spawning period, discarded undersized fish, and damaged the ecology of theocean floor (Palmer 1995).

13. Although TAGS allowed people between the ages of 55 and 64 to enroll in an earlyretirement program that would carry them through until they qualified for theirfederal government pensions, the majority of TAGS recipients were in their fortiesand early fifties and did not qualify.

14. Cod are significant predators of shrimp and juvenile crab and lobster, and manybelieve that the decline of cod and other groundfish was directly related to their sub-sequent rise in numbers (Bavington, Grzetic, and Neis 2004; Frank et al. 2005;Davis, Whalen, and Neis In Press). A wealth of empirical evidence shows that thispattern of “fishing down marine food-webs” has been observed in a variety of otherlocations throughout the world as well (Pauly et al. 1998).

15. More information is contained in Gambling on the Future: Video Lottery Terminalsand Social Change in Rural Newfoundland (Davis 2000), a Master’s thesis com-pleted at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

16. The first was New Brunswick. VLTs are now legally available in all Canadian prov-inces, except for Ontario and British Columbia, although the latter two do permitother electronic gambling devices in certain designated areas, such as racetracksand casinos.

17. With few other employment opportunities available, people with year-round jobswere the exceptions rather than the rule in most rural areas of the province.Although plant workers and inshore fishers often obtained only a few months ofwork each summer, this was enough wage labour to sustain them throughout theyear, because unemployment insurance benefits made it possible for most seasonalworkers to qualify for modest payments during the winter (Wright 2001). Sider(2003) has argued that unemployment insurance became a means through whichthe federal government could subsidize fish-processing companies, by allowing themto hold a stable workforce in place on a year-to-year basis while only paying salariesfor part of the year.

18. Many of those interviewed said clubs had largely displaced the practice of social vis-iting in private homes, which had once been very common in rural Newfoundland.Many Newfoundland ethnographers have catalogued the elaborate visiting prac-tices that were unique to the island, particularly Christmas “mummering” in whichpeople disguised themselves in elaborate costumes to conceal their identities andwent from house to house with the expectation of being taken in and offered foodand drink (Halpert and Story 1969; Sider 1986)

19. In practice, the TAGS program exceeded budgetary allocations before its five-yearmandate was complete. Thus, midway through the program, it was announced thatit would be terminating a year earlier than had been promised (Sider 2003: 32).

20. Despite the frequency of violent attacks, very few of the VLTs had sustained seriousdamage. One man’s fist had cracked a screen, and various machines had to have

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buttons replaced from time to time, but otherwise they had escaped unscathed. Theresiliency of the VLTs had fostered a belief among many of the regulars that theywere designed to take punishment.

21. In 2005 another man in the town of Grand Falls, Newfoundland, was arrested fordestroying several machines, and similar incidents have been reported elsewhere inCanada (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2006).

22. Much of this work built on an already well-developed anthropological and sociologi-cal literature exploring the complex intersections between class, consumption, lei-sure, and identity (Clarke and Critcher 1985; Rojek 1985; Butsch 1990).

23. This reference to hidden “transcripts” is drawn from the work of James C. Scott. Intwo highly influential books, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of PeasantResistance (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts(1990), Scott questioned the idea that subordinate peoples unquestioningly acceptthe hegemonic ideologies of the powerful. He focused attention on the many ways inwhich seemingly powerless peasants routinely challenge and subvert dominantmeanings through acts of “everyday resistance.” Scott distinguished his work fromprevious accounts through his insistence that resistance need not take the form ofexplicit efforts to gain political power, such as political protests or open revolts.Rather, he argued that peasants routinely challenge top-down ideologies, but theyoften do so inconspicuously to avoid open confrontations. Scott’s argument has beensubsequently critiqued for romantically overstating the agency of oppressed peoples(Hale 1994).

24. These fears soon proved justified. Snow crab stocks are believed to have declinedsignificantly in many areas in the last five years, and fishers in many areas haveseen their quotas cut by more than twenty-five percent during that period. Whetherthis is the direct result of overfishing or a consequence of the snow crab population’sbiological cycle remains unclear.

25. Although some gamblers had heard about the organization Gamblers Anonymous,very few knew there was a government-funded addiction counsellor based in theregional centre, a forty-five-minute drive away. Even if they had known of her exist-ence, however, the counsellor had a ten-month waiting list before she could take ona new person.

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