'I thought I was fired when they called me!'
While many Canadians are struggling financially these days, a group of seven workmates in Alberta is celebrating after hitting the jackpot, bagging a prize of $5 million.
Edmond Beti, Jeremy Buckley, Faye Brautigam, Cindy Einarson, Christopher Ford, Eamon O’Nyons, and Jason Penhalagan – who work together in Calgary – scored the win on the June 29 Lotto 6/49 draw.
“I thought I was fired when they called me!” Brautigam said in a press release from Western Canada Lottery. “They told me to take it off speaker phone and it took a while to sink in!”
Edmond came to break the news, Einarson said: “I thought he was about to ask for my portion of the money, but he said we won $5 million!”
The group purchased their ticket at a 7-Eleven in Calgary.
“We had two people check on their apps, and two others compare the numbers with the winning selection online,” Beti said, according to the release. “We just couldn’t believe it!”
The Badlee Distributors workers plan to split the prize among themselves.
The number of Canadians who are struggling financially today is bigger than the comparable data recorded when the COVID-19 pandemic was still ongoing, according to a report from Statistics Canada (StatCan).
‘No one is quitting’ their job
The coworkers had played together for six years and said it had become a fun routine to check if they had won on their weekly Super Pack.
From the group, Ford said he would take his kids to Disneyland using his winnings: “They always ask to go, and I always say, ‘Only if we win the lottery,’ so now I have to!”
And the group agrees on one thing: “No one is quitting,” said Beti in the release. “Most of us are investing it for retirement or towards mortgages.”
In 2022, the median family after-tax income of Canadians was $60,800, up by 2.5% from 2021, before adjusting for inflation. However, when adjusted for an annual rate of inflation of 6.8%, the 2022 median family after-tax income was 4.0% lower than in 2021, according to StatCan.
