Service Alberta Minister Dale Nally is travelling to Las Vegas this week to promote Alberta’s new regulated online gambling market and meet with industry partners. The province hopes to attract more iGaming providers, which Nally said could help limit the reach of unregulated operators. “The more regulated operators we attract to Alberta, the more we can crowd out predatory, unregulated operators,” he told Postmedia on Saturday.

Nally, who is described as the architect of Alberta’s regulated iGaming market, will attend the Global Gaming Expo, known as G2E. A Friday news release said he will showcase the province’s market and discuss ways to strengthen player protections. His itinerary includes sessions, meetings with industry representatives, roundtable discussions and networking.

“The iGaming space is evolving quickly, and attending G2E helps us stay on top of it so our player protections continue to reflect how people are actually gambling,” Nally said in a statement to Postmedia. The four-day expo is being held on the Las Vegas Strip at the Venetian Resort. It brings together 400 exhibitors and 25,000 industry professionals from more than 120 countries.

Nally is set to speak at a panel on Tuesday afternoon with Cory Fox, a senior vice-president at iGaming company FanDuel; Elizabeth Cronan of GeoComply; and Steve Inglis of the Alberta iGaming Corporation. The gathering gives the minister an opportunity to hear from people working in the industry as Alberta develops its regulated market.

David Hodgins, a research coordinator with the Alberta Gambling Research Institute and a professor in the University of Calgary’s department of psychology, said it makes sense for the government to learn what industry leaders want. He cautioned that those views should be considered alongside other evidence and experiences. “This perspective needs, of course, to be supplemented with other perspectives, including individuals and families experiencing harm, players at all levels of involvement with gambling, objective evidence and more,” Hodgins said.

Hodgins also said the government’s regulatory plan should permit transparent oversight of both the benefits and harms of the safeguards currently in place. The source report also noted that Alberta has advanced $2.4 million for gambling addiction treatment and described an explosion of online gambling advertisements in the province. It did not provide further details about those developments.

Based on reporting by Edmonton Journal.