Gambling in British Columbia: a history

1985: BCLC breaks away from the Western Canada consortium

British Columbia was part of the multi-province Western Canada Lottery Foundation (later Corporation) from 1974, running lottery draws jointly with Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan rather than through its own dedicated corporation. That changed in 1985 (incorporated 1984, independent operations from 1 April 1985), when BC established its own British Columbia Lottery Corporation. BCLC's early lottery revenue was explicitly tied to a landmark BC infrastructure project: proceeds helped fund construction connected to Expo 86, including SkyTrain and the Expo Centre (today Science World).

BCLC's authority sits under BC's Gaming Control Act and the same Criminal Code s.207 "conduct and manage" framework used across the country (see our national history guide). Today BCLC conducts and manages every legal form of gambling in the province — lottery, land-based casino, and online — a single-corporation structure closer to Quebec's Loto-Québec model than to Ontario's later split between OLG and a competitive private-operator iGaming layer.

1987: BC's first commercial casinos

BC's first commercial casinos opened in 1987, operated by Great Canadian Casino Company (founded 1982, later renamed Great Canadian Gaming Corporation and, after going private in 2021, Great Canadian Entertainment), with Nanaimo Casino generally cited as first alongside openings in Richmond and Langley the same year. It's worth noting that some national sources point to a Winnipeg casino (1989) as "Canada's first commercial casino" — a claim that appears to sit alongside BC's 1987 openings rather than contradict them outright, likely reflecting a distinction between BC's charity-model casino licensing at the time and a fully government-run commercial casino elsewhere, though we haven't been able to fully reconcile the two claims and flag it here rather than assert either superlative as settled.

Great Canadian went on to become BC's dominant private casino operator under BCLC licence, running facilities including River Rock Casino Resort in Richmond — the property that would later become central to the Cullen Commission's money-laundering findings, described below.

2004–2010: PlayNow.com and BC's online-casino claim

BCLC introduced online gambling through PlayNow.com in 2004 (we could not confirm an exact launch day/month from a primary source), initially offering only lottery-style draw products rather than casino games. Six years later, on 15 July 2010, BCLC added blackjack, craps and roulette to PlayNow — and its own press release that day was headlined "BC first jurisdiction in North America to offer legal, online casino games."

That framing is worth treating carefully: it's BCLC's own claim from its own 2010 announcement, widely repeated since by secondary sources, but not independently adjudicated by any neutral regulator or academic source we could find. It's plausible on its face — legal state-run online gambling in the US didn't begin until Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey launched in 2013, three years later — but the honest framing for readers is "BCLC announced this as a North American first in July 2010," not an unattributed statement of settled fact.

2019–2022: the Cullen Commission and the "Vancouver Model"

British Columbia's defining gambling-related news story of the past decade wasn't a launch or a legal reform — it was an inquiry into what had been happening inside its casinos for years. The Cullen Commission (formally the Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering in British Columbia) was established by the BC government in May 2019, held 143 hearing days and heard 199 witnesses across 2020–2021, and delivered its final report to the Attorney General in early June 2022 before publicly releasing it on 15 June 2022 — a report running over 1,800 pages with 101 recommendations.

The Commission's most widely cited finding described a pattern dubbed the "Vancouver Model": cash facilitators with organised-crime ties would advance large sums of cash to wealthy casino patrons at Lower Mainland casinos — River Rock Casino Resort in Richmond was named repeatedly in testimony — who would then repay the facilitators via offshore bank transfers, effectively laundering the cash through the casino's legitimate gaming activity. Testimony from a former senior BCLC investigator placed this pattern as active from at least 2009 onward, and a leaked 2015 government anti-money-laundering report (reported publicly in September 2017) found that River Rock alone had accepted roughly $13–13.5 million in $20 bills in a single month, and around $20 million in total suspicious cash transactions in July 2015 alone. The Commission's overall conclusion was that billions of dollars a year were being laundered through British Columbia, with casinos as one identified channel, and its recommendations included lowering casinos' cash-transaction disclosure thresholds and giving BC's Independent Gaming Control Office authority over BCLC independent of the responsible minister.

Sources & further reading

• Wikipedia — British Columbia Lottery Corporation
• Wikipedia — PlayNow.com
• Newswire — BC first jurisdiction in North America to offer legal online casino games (15 July 2010 press release)
• Cullen Commission — final report
• Osler — Cullen Commission releases final report
• CTV News — River Rock casino accepted $13M in $20s in a month, anti-money-laundering report