In the 1960s, John Hallett and his wife, Phyllis, left Hermitage-Sandyville, Newfoundland and Labrador in search of better lives. The harbour town’s economy was driven by the precarious cod industry, but moving to Windsor, Ontario — Canada’s motor city — resulted in Hallett securing a career at a Chrysler plant. “He hardly ever missed a day of work,” his only child Karlene Baert, remembers. “The man was loyal beyond belief.”

Hallett was also careful with money. “He and my mom scrimped and saved all their lives,” Baert says. This financial acuity bought a suburban house and paid for Baert’s wedding, plus the gift of a down payment for her own family home. Hallett treated himself to a black Corvette convertible and still retired mortgage-free, with savings ready to support him and Phyllis in old age.

The Halletts had envisioned a retirement of travel and leisure, including Phyllis’s dream of visiting Newfoundland again. But on the cusp of this new chapter she got sick. In 1998, the family made an RV pilgrimage to Hermitage to bury Phyllis’s ashes, nearly a year after her death from congestive heart failure. There Hallett shared a cryptic message with Baert: one day nothing would be left for her and the family. She didn’t take the comment seriously. It was an emotional time.

Hallett’s behaviour shifted after returning to Ontario. He became less interested in favourite activities like spending time with his grandkids or watching planes take off at the airport. Baert would invite him over frequently, but he would decline, often claiming to feel sick.

Once Baert received a call that Hallett hadn’t paid his car insurance, but since Phyllis had been the one to pay the bills, she took it at face value that he’d forgotten. Baert fretted, but didn’t want to pry into her father’s finances. “I didn’t want him to think that I was after his money.”

But then, in 2005, Hallett attempted suicide.

He told Baert that he had “lost everything,” having drained his RRSPs and savings at Windsor’s casino starting shortly after Phyllis’s death. He admitted to refinancing his mortgage-free house with a high-interest non-bank lender, and missing payments. Baert calculates Hallett’s total losses over seven years at around $380,000.

Hallett temporarily moved into Baert’s home and would spend days lying on the couch, staring at his stomach and worrying about his losses. Though diagnosed with depression, he stopped taking his prescribed medication. Using the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation’s voluntary self-exclusion process, Hallett banned himself from the casino.

Once Hallett had depleted his accounts, he was too broke to gamble. “That’s when it all kind of hit him,” Baert says. She, along with his medical professionals, suggested therapy, but he claimed to be past the problem. Baert says he never went back. “He barely got out of bed or went anywhere unless I insisted,” she recalls. More suicide attempts followed.

On September 3, 2005, Baert arrived at Hallett’s doorstep with a basket of laundry she had washed for him. The house was quiet and the attic door ajar. 

“I found him,” she says. “I don’t really like to talk too much about that.”

Hallett had died by suicide at 76. Though depressed and still grieving his wife’s death, Baert believes gambling was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” When an Ontario coroner’s service investigator collected information on Hallett’s death, Baert mentioned, unprompted, her father’s compulsive gambling and its negative effects on his life. She wanted his file to show “that yes, he committed suicide, but it was due to gambling.” The investigators promised it would, she says.

Hallett is one of at least 963 suicide deaths in Canada since 2000 linked to gambling problems. 

To better understand gambling-related suicide (GRS) in Canada, Ricochet Media asked provincial chief medical examiner (CME) offices for the number of suicide files since 2000 where they recorded gambling as a risk factor, to assemble the largest-ever national collection of GRS data, and understand the size of the issue, how it’s developed over time, and what is being done to prevent it. 

Eight provinces responded with GRS data covering multiple years. (Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island shared none.) The data and responses from different government agencies, including CME offices, suggest this is a neglected area of public health.

Based on these GRS records, there have been about 42 deaths annually on average, or about one every nine days. Though about 4,000 Canadians die by suicide, annually — a number that has generally increased since 2000 — this small number is still significant. If separated from other suicides, current GRS numbers place them among the top 40 causes of death in Canada. However even with incomplete figures, experts suggest the problem is undercounted.

While suicide involves multiple factors, and it can be difficult to pinpoint the precedence one factor takes over another, researchers have found gambling to have a significant impact. They generally suggest that 5 to 10 per cent of suicides, at minimum, are gambling-related, based on research that includes coronial data reviews. Yet, in individual Canadian provinces, according to data collected by Ricochet GRS are frequently 2.5 per cent or less of overall suicides. Data gaps and a lack of national reporting standards support the case that actual GRS numbers may be higher.

With increased focus on gambling-suicide links in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom, and with strategizing at the federal level to reduce suicides overall, there is pressure on lawmakers to rethink Canada’s approach to GRS. Questions remain about whether provinces have done enough to track and prevent deaths.

CENTRAL CANADA GRS
Total reported: 720
Quebec: 453
Quebec’s privacy regulations allow for the Coroner’s Office to share coroner investigation reports. Ricochet asked for gambling-related files and reviewed them manually. Files include situations where problematic relationships with gambling or diagnosed gambling addiction were part of the deceased’s medical history, often alongside financial issues. Gambling was identified in suicide notes or as a risk factor by family or during the investigation. In some cases, the coroner specifically listed it as a precipating event for suicide.
Ontario: 267
The Office of the Chief Coroner provided a list of suicides with recorded gambling involvement, totalling 128 from 2000 to 2021. When asked to repeat the search with additional search terms including “casino” and “VLT,” similar to other provinces, the number grew to 261 between 2001 to 2023. To complete the data, the six previously provided for 2000 were added.

Acceptance of gambling driven by advertising and lobbying

In the 1800s, Canadian newspapers printed stories linking gambling and suicides, though it was considered a concern mostly afflicting upper class gamblers in European casinos. The launch and expansion of government-run casinos and video lottery terminals (VLTs) that swept Canada in the early 1990s made it an issue affecting the masses. By 1993, the link of a New Brunswick man’s suicide to VLT addiction was the first of dozens of news headlines over the next decade which established GRS as a public health issue in Canada. Today, government-affiliated gambling options have expanded to include online casinos and sports betting, with the accompanying advertising drawing criticism because of their appeal to youth and volume.

Survey data released last week by the charitable research organization Mental Health Research Canada suggests 60 per cent of people at high risk of gambling problems reported that ads influenced them to gamble more.

The widespread cultural acceptance of legalized gambling is connected to viewing gambling as a personal choice, neglecting the addictive nature of the heavily-promoted gaming options and ignoring the dire financial and mental health consequences for those who become addicted — a view pushed through marketing and industry lobbying efforts.

Gambling on expansion despite concerns

Preventing suicides is a stated goal of a cadre of non-profits as well as provincial and federal government agencies. In 2016, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) created a national suicide prevention framework. Progress reports since then have identified several groups — 2SLGBTQ+, men, seniors and youth — as disproportionately affected, though not gamblers. The original strategy mentions only that addictions may increase suicide risk, offering gambling as an example, and PHAC neglects to mention gambling in later biannual strategy updates.

PHAC media relations advisor André Gagnon says the agency recognizes the relationship between people with gambling problems and suicide, but that “at the national level, there are limited data about problem gambling.”

He mentions the 2018 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), an annual survey of Canadian health habits as an example. It suggests nearly one million Canadian adults — four per cent of males and 2.6 percent of females — have gambling problems or are at-risk. Earlier this year in Norway, a review of 107 studies found that suicide attempts and ideations among gamblers, as well as suicide deaths, outpace the general population. This puts a population equivalent to Nova Scotia at heightened suicide risks.

The Mental Health Research Canada report suggests a potentially larger effect, that one in 10 Canadians are at high risk of gambling problems, with the number rising to one in 5 among Canadians 18 to 34. “These are astonishing numbers,” says Matthew Young, chief research officer of GREO Evidence Insights, a non-profit focused gambling-related additions, comparing them to a 2012 review of 202 prevalence surveys which found 0.4 to 8.1 per cent of people had gambling problems. (Young cautions, however, that the new survey numbers may be inflated because the sample is drawn from an online panel.)

PHAC examines suicide rates of smaller groups within communities “to identify those who have higher rates than the global average, or have rates that are increasing more rapidly over time,” Gagnon said. There is no specific threshold that determines if a group is disproportionately impacted by suicide, it states.

This underlying risk seems at odds with the continued expansion and availability of legalized gambling across Canada, including legal single-sports betting in every province, two recently-opened casino resorts in the Greater Toronto Area, and more than 80 new legal online casinos in Ontario through its iGaming Ontario provincial agency.

Ricochet asked iGaming Ontario, the provincial agency which regulates and manages internet gaming provided through private operators, if GRS factored into policy creation or determining expansion plans.

A spokesperson declined to comment on past GRS statistics, but said prior to iGaming Ontario’s 2022 launch, “approximately 70 per cent of online gambling was happening on unregulated sites without any requirements for player protections, self-exclusion or responsible gambling tools.”

Alberta is considering the launch of a similar online gaming marketplace. Ricochet reached out to the province’s Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction, Dale Nally, and asked whether Alberta’s GRS data was being considered as plans take shape. Nally’s press secretary Brandon Aboultaif said that “[a]ll iGaming models being considered would have a focus on social responsibility,” though he didn’t mention if and how GRS will be addressed.

‘An important contributor to suicide’

Research into Canada’s gambling industry has shown that there has always been some level of acceptance of harm from GRS. Federation University Australia associate professor, Angela Rintoul says higher numbers would be a “plausible outcome,” and reflect emerging evidence from other jurisdictions.

“At the moment, we don’t have any systematic investigation for gambling-related suicide cases,” says Rintoul, who studies gambling harm reduction. This is true in many countries, including Canada. A review of Hong Kong coroner data once found nearly 20 per cent of suicides were GRS, but she notes, this stems from police examinations of financial records of deaths with unexplained debts, which is not common practice in Australia or Canada.

Rintoul says that higher GRS estimates also count suicides where gambling is present in the deceased’s life to lesser or unknown degrees, since gambling losses and related stresses exacerbate other mental health issues, which may, in turn, lead to suicide. Finnish researchers, in a review of 20 research papers on gambling and suicide, specifically link indebtedness and shame caused by gambling as “an important contributor to suicide.”

Provincial GRS data collected by Ricochet is too small to show or echo identifiable trends. However, despite having Canada’s highest rates of people with or at-risk for gambling problems, Manitoba and Saskatchewan have, on average, lower GRS percentages of overall suicides than British Columbia and Ontario, the provinces with the lowest at-risk rates, according to a recent national study. New Brunswick and Manitoba both recorded zero gambling-related suicides in multiple calendar years.

Rintoul says it is unlikely a province with legalized gambling has zero GRS in a year, particularly given that Manitoba and New Brunswick, like the Australian state of Victoria have high numbers of electronic gambling machines and high per capita suicide rates.

“I can’t think of what would suddenly stop during that time, that just seems very unusual,” Rintoul says.

WESTERN CANADA GRS
Total reported: 208
Manitoba: 32
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner shared 32 GRS with Ricochet recorded between 2000 and 2023. Though the office shared it with Ricochet in multi-year increments, an earlier data release showed multiple years with zero recorded GRS.
Alberta: 72
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner says there have been 72 suicides where gambling may have been a risk factor.
Saskatchewan: 20
During 2015 to 2021, Saskatchewan ran a project tracking risk factors, recording six gambling-related suicides in this timeframe. The Coroners Service has not tracked gambling as a suicide risk factor since this project’s completion. It previously shared 14 between 2000 and 2007 with the Globe and Mail.
British Columbia: 84
The 84 from the BC Coroners Service include shared figures from 2000 to 2002 through access to information and 2015 to 2023. It previously released documents including data from 2003 to 2014.
Territories: Not collected
GRS data was not collected from the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon Territory because this investigation focused only on jurisdictions with year-round casinos and/or VLTs.

The Canadian gambling industry talks a lot about responsible gambling measures, often through campaigns like the Healthy Play initiatives promoted by Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC). Ricochet asked ALC, the crown corporation that provides government-regulated lottery products in the Atlantic provinces, if it considered GRS when making recent business decisions like expanding into sports betting and online casinos.

ALC communications strategist Greg Weston says the corporation “regularly consults with independent responsible gambling experts, research and prevalence studies” to help them deliver their games and products responsibly, though he cited no specific sources and did not directly address GRS.

In the past, casino and lottery executives were more direct when discussing GRS, though often quick to dismiss the risks. When a Nova Scotia casino patron died by suicide in 1998 after a 10-day gambling binge, the casino’s vice president faulted “other issues, lifestyle issues.” In September 2000, then-Loto-Québec president Michel Crête responded to reports of GRS in Quebec with sarcasm. “We hide them in the garages,” he said. “We bury them in the parking lot.”

But in 2003 there was a reckoning over GRS deaths when the Canadian Press published previously unreleased CME data linking 10 per cent of Albertan suicides in 2001 and six per cent of Nova Scotian suicides over the previous two years to gambling. The resulting uproar led to CMEs discussing gambling-related suicide at a national meeting of CMEs in Iqaluit later that year. 

The meeting’s host, the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, says it has no details on file. Such meetings continue annually to exchange ideas, though as Nova Scotia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Matthew Bowes writes in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, “this forum has no budget or lawful mandate to set and enforce standards.” Bowes has also written critically on the lack of CME standards in the country — due in part to variations between the coroner and medical examiner systems, principally that unlike coroners, medical examiners must be doctors.

Though coroner and medical examiner offices are under government jurisdiction and legislated by provincial CME acts, they operate independently. This allows the offices some flexibility in how they choose to investigate deaths, like Nova Scotia, asking direct questions about gambling. It ended the practice in 2002 after 20 months, during a time where several chief medical examiners came and went in quick succession. This practice, which was never common, was also abandoned by Manitoba and Ontario.

Dr. Simon Avis, former chief medical examiner of Newfoundland and Labrador, attended the 2003 Iqaluit meeting. “Whilst we recognized your gambling might be a precipitating factor [in suicides], that is very difficult to really determine,” he says. A few months before the meeting, Avis told CP that the numbers suggested GRS was a topic worth studying, but challenging to be definitive about. “They can’t say for sure gambling [caused] suicide; all they can say is the person who committed suicide gambled.” Avis, who continues to work as a medical examiner, still believes this.

Avis recalls no consensus at the meeting, though CP reported that Canadian CMEs agreed afterward to standardized, active GRS tracking to better comprehend these suicides and reduce their prevalence. Provinces would track GRS if suicide notes or family interviews mentioned gambling. But this passive approach may explain the lack of recorded data. Suicide notes are present in fewer than two out of five suicide deaths, according to researchers. Though CMEs frequently interview people close to the deceased, interviewees may be unaware of the deceased’s gambling, or choose not to mention it for cultural, personal or religious reasons.

Piecing together a patchwork of data

The 2003 Canadian Press investigation into GRS mentioned a new national database could soon assist with the recording of suicide risk factors like gambling. The Canadian Coroner Medical Examiner Database (CCMED) collects information from Canadian coroner and medical examiner offices. Because the detail level varies the CCMED does not recommend disaggregating the data.
The CCMED searched using keywords ‘casino, gamble, gambling and VLT,’ then manually reviewed narrative reports to remove non-gambling-related deaths. It found 250 in the database, 205 male and 45 female. About 75 per cent of the gambling-related suicides showed evidence of problematic gambling, with the remainder featuring other evidence of gambling, gambling prior to death, or mentioning a family member with a gambling addiction.
The CCMED acknowledges the count may be underestimated. The resulting figure is about half the number collected in this investigation for the same time period, despite not having full participation of provinces.

After 2003, GRS headlines tapered off, and the deaths faded from public conversation. “It was no longer the flavor of the day, and no one seemed to be really interested in it or interested in pursuing it,” Avis says. This includes the CME offices who had agreed to track these deaths.

Reports from The Tyee in 2007 and The Globe and Mail in 2009 show tracking GRS was no longer a settled issue. Some provinces said they didn’t track GRS; others grouped data, hindering year-to-year analysis (which some still do today, citing concerns over small case numbers), and others provided data for the prior year only. 

The most recent large-scale investigation was six years ago, when La Presse identified 401 GRS in Quebec’s coronial files from 1993 to 2018, after applying filters such as mention in a family interview or suicide letter. Neither the province’s Ministry of Health and Social Services nor coroner’s office could identify specific reforms after publication that improved the tracking or prevention of GRS for Ricochet.

Since 2020, coroners and medical examiners have contended with two major public health challenges — the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis. Though it shows that coroners, medical examiners and provincial governments alike can innovate the tracking and prevention of deaths when the will exists, these trends further obscured GRS just as a new wave of legal gambling expansion swept across Canada.

Tracking the data to prevent future suicides

In 2009, Nova Scotia told the Globe that the province no longer tracked GRS as there was “no way to gather the information.” Twice prior to this investigation, in 2020 and 2022, a Nova Scotia’s medical examiner’s office spokesperson repeated this claim.

In 2022, media relations advisor Heather Fairbairn said determining all the underlying factors of such deaths is extremely complex. “For that reason, the medical examiner service does not keep or publish statistics with respect to the underlying factors in suicide.”

Dr. Bowes, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Examiner, clarified that although the province doesn’t formally keep GRS statistics, it does passively within death investigation files — if gambling is brought to their attention. In theory, this is enough to establish potential connection, though not with a level of certainty that Bowes feels comfortable with.

He is not certain CME files are the place to track reasons for suicides. The mandate of these offices is to answer the same basic questions journalists do — who, what, where, when and how. There’s no mandate for why, Bowes says.

“We’re tasked with the how and what, and you’re interested in the great why,” he says. Though complex to assess, he adds CMEs sometimes “glimpse the great why.” But it’s not definitive, which is why some CMEs don’t weigh in.

At Ricochet’s request, Dr. Bowes obtained GRS figures for Nova Scotia. From 2007 to 2021, there were 23 files out of 1,836 suicides which mentioned gambling keywords, representing 1.25 per cent of those deaths. His office told Ricochet that some may be false positives, adding that only seven files recorded gambling in a suicide note.

Turning grief into action

In his mid-teens, Jack Ritchie of Sheffield, England started playing slot machines, hoping to win enough to buy “free” lunches. In the years that followed, he would gamble away an inheritance, his bank overdraft and a student loan. While teaching English abroad in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2017, Jack died by suicide at age 24, mentioning his gambling addiction in the note he left for his parents, Charles and Liz Ritchie.

The Ritchies knew Jack struggled with gambling, but weren’t aware of its connection with heightened suicide risks. “As far as we were aware, we were the first gambling suicide that had ever been,” Charles Ritchie says. But after searching news stories and contacting coroners and bereavement support networks, they found more than 50 other families bereaved by GRS. This contrasted with a records request to the Office of National Statistics, which showed only 21 out of tens of thousands of suicide files in England and Wales mentioned gambling between 2001 and 2016.

In 2018, the Ritchies founded Gambling with Lives, a charity to build GRS awareness and fight for policy changes in the UK, including for “all GRS to be reported, investigated and recorded” by coroners. Their work has brought GRS to the forefront of UK gambling reforms, as the government updates the 2005 Gambling Act to reflect modern realities like online gambling.

Based on an evidence review of gambling-suicide studies, Public Health England estimates there’s 117 to 496 GRS annually in England, or between two and 10 per cent of suicides. 

When asked if it keeps an estimate, Canada’s public health agency says it “does not estimate how many suicide deaths per year are attributable to any single risk factor.” Provincial public health agencies don’t have an estimate either. Other than news reports, the only widely-cited Canadian GRS statistics were attributed to the Canada Safety Council (CSC). In a 2004 report it suggested between 200 and 360 annual gaming-related suicides nationally — a figure equivalent to about five to nine per cent of overall suicides. Lewis Smith, CSC’s national projects manager, says the Council couldn’t find supporting data and removed the stat from its website in 2018. 

Two coronial inquests into GRS deaths in the UK — Jack Ritchie’s in 2022 and Luke Ashton’s in 2023 — have resulted, in part, from GWL advocacy. Unlike typical death investigations, inquests involve fact-finding beyond normal scope, calling evidence and witnesses and determining, as Bowes would put it, “the great why” in order to make recommendations to prevent other similar suicides. (At least two have taken place in Australia since 2010 as well.)

Reports are released to “interested persons,” a legal term for people, government departments and other organizations, who can act to prevent further such deaths. In the case of Ashton, a 40-year-old father from Leicester, one of the world’s largest betting companies, Betfair, was deemed an “interested person,” reportedly for the first time. This resulted in Betfair making several policy updates including monthly deposit limits for all customers returning from self-exclusion periods and a £10 stake limit for online slot games.

“Gambling disorder” was also listed as a secondary cause of his 2021 death — supposedly a UK first — and surprising as typically gambling only gets recorded as a risk factor. A recent development could open discussion anew. The 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases — the codes used worldwide to indicate medical diagnoses and causes of death — assigned new codes to gambling disorder. In theory, this allows it to be included on death certificates consistently. The Canadian Institute for Health Information, which works with StatCan on ICD-11 adoption in Canada, said in November 2024 that assessment is underway on implementing the updates, but a date is unknown.

Though Bowes can’t speak on the particular case of Luke Ashton, he’s uncertain about putting gambling disorder on a death certificate, and doesn’t expect it will start a debate among his peers in Canada. “I think it’s well known that suicide is an incredibly complex and multifactorial phenomenon,” he says. “I think it would be a mistake to offer so strong an opinion.”

Canadian CME offices generally have authority to perform inquests, which are frequently held over several days, and sometimes known by other terms like fatality inquiries. Bowes notes that his office can only recommend fatality inquiries, which are more resource-intensive and rare — only four have taken place since 2000. For deaths in hospitals, prisons or workplaces, inquests are typically mandatory. But most CMEs can order inquests if they believe public interest exists, including making recommendations to provincial governments, which must be acknowledged, responded to, and used to revisit policies.

In 2010, Ontario’s coroner office completed an inquest into the suicide of 18-year-old Sara Carlin to review the circumstances of her death, and, more broadly, links between antidepressant use and teenage suicides. With six per cent of Canadians using prescription antidepressants — a figure similar to the rate of adults who are at risk for or have gambling problems according to CCHS data — it suggests both have similar public interest arguments. But no Canadian GRS has resulted in an inquest or equivalent, unsurprising given longstanding wariness of the issue among CMEs. 

Ontario briefly considered it in 2004, and Manitoba’s then chief medical examiner Dr. Thambirajah Balachandra told the Winnipeg Free Press there were few cases where gambling’s role was certain, and that there were other deaths, from drunk driving and teen Indigenous suicides, to urgently worry about.

Bowes considers death review committees a better fit for understanding GRS. Nova Scotia launched such committees in 2023, chaired by Bowes and made up of subject matter experts and community members, which analyze a particular type of death — like deaths in custody of children or related to domestic violence. Committees have power to obtain the deceased’s records and produce public annual reports with their findings.

“More importantly, they’re given a specific mandate to explore the causative factors and to make recommendations to prevent those kinds of deaths in the future,” Bowes says.

ATLANTIC CANADA GRS
Total reported: 35
Newfoundland and Labrador: 1
The NL Office of the Chief Medial Examiner shared no data with Ricochet. Only one gambling-related suicide, the death of Susan Piercey in 2003, is widely reported in media and referenced as such in the government Hansard.
New Brunswick: 15
Coroner Services recorded 15 gambling-related suicides between 2006 and 2023. In nine separate calendar years it recorded zero gambling-related suicides. Access to data from coroner investigations prior to 2006 is restricted under the Archives Act due to the personal information the files contain.
Prince Edward Island: 1
In 2009, the Globe and Mail reported one gambling-related suicide in the previous five years in the province and that coroners had been asked to start tracking gambling as a risk factor. The Chief Coroners Office shared no data with Ricochet.
Nova Scotia: 17
The Medical Examiner Service recorded at least 17 gambling-related suicides since 2001, though 10 are based on the 2003 CP report. Though 2007 to 2021 data indicated 23 reports that included gambling terms, the office said this included some false positives. Without a full file review, it’s uncertain exactly how many are GRS, except the seven suicides that mention gambling specifically in a suicide note.

All provinces currently have at least one death review committee, though none presently focuses on GRS.

“I think that the [gambling-related] suicide issue is one that is probably better dealt with by a death review committee than through the death certificate.”

In neighbouring New Brunswick, the recent pilot of a suicide fatality review committee coincided with the development of a new Coroners Office form to capture information from death investigations.

“The new form requires the capture of information related to potential gambling issues, and this will allow the committee to better assess the impact of gambling addictions as a suicide factor,” David Kelly, a communications officer with the New Brunswick Department of Health, tells Ricochet, in response to questions posed to Robert McKee, the newly-appointed Minister responsible for Addictions and Mental Health Services.

Coroner Services quietly implemented the new protocol in January 2024 and has already captured one GRS death using the new system — prior to that it had only recorded one since the start of 2017.

Kelly adds that the committee’s work will help the government “understand if gambling addiction is under-captured due to being a secondary or tertiary factor, as well as the scope of the issue in New Brunswick.” The Coroners Office record management system has the ability to capture gambling as a risk factor.

The Department of Health says it welcomes improvements to data collection to enable better decision-making. “Better data allows for more tailored interventions, programs, and policies,” Kelly tells Ricochet. “Ultimately, improved recording allows for more informed decision-making, better outcomes, and ultimately helping prevent suicides.”

After Hallett’s death, Baert found a letter he had written to his bank as his losses mounted. A final loan request, sharing his descent into gambling addiction, mentiafoned Phyllis’s passing as the impetus.

“Her death hit me hard and I felt I had nothing to live for,” he wrote in capital letters. “Soon as the loneliness [sic] got to me, I started to visit the casino. I was soon addicted and could not break the habit.”

For some families, GRS deaths leave “legacy debts” — like unpaid mortgages or personal loans or depleted retirement savings for surviving partners. These hardships even ripple through generations. After selling Hallett’s house, Baert settled the debts he had left behind, but everything he’d worked for was gone.

“There really was nothing left,” she says.

Baert agreed to request her father’s coroner file to see what, if anything, investigators had recorded about his gambling, though by publication the Office of the Chief Coroner had not responded.

On Wednesday September 7, 2005, shortly before lunchtime, family and friends gathered for Hallett’s funeral service. Baert learned afterwards that a casino employee was among the mourners. Another casino employee, who attended Baert’s church, quit after he heard about Hallett’s suicide. “He could no longer be a part of something that would cause that,” she says.

Despite speaking publicly about her father’s death, Baert has never met anyone else who has suffered a GRS loss in their family. “Nobody has said to me, that’s happened to me too,” she says.

Baert says losing her father was particularly hard because he was always energetic and healthy — he didn’t even need glasses. He fixed his own cars and did his own home repairs. He once tore up his back lawn to level it because he didn’t like the way the lawnmower rolled across it. She remembers Hallett drilling cracked bricks out of the side of the house, one drill hole at a time, to the astonishment of his neighbours. “But that was just Dad,” Baert says, “if he was going to do it he’d put his all into it.”

She believes he would still be alive today, in his nineties, if it hadn’t been for his gambling addiction.

“He had everything to live for.”

HELP IS AVAILABLE

If you or someone you care about needs help with gambling, reach out to your local gambling treatment hotline. A list of hotlines across Canada is available at the Lower-Risk Gambling Guidelines website.

If are dealing with thoughts of suicide or are worried about someone else, help is available. Dial 988 to speak with a trained responder at Canada’s Suicide Crisis Helpline and learn more at the helpline’s website.