BCLC’s list of “10 Feel-Good Lottery Winners of 2020” includes the story of a Surrey dad whose lottery win helped make his daughter’s dream wedding a reality.
Baljit Singh Gill won $2 million in a BC49 draw last January.
Prior to that, the Fleetwood-area truck driver “spent months budgeting how to make his daughter’s upcoming wedding special,” according to a post on corporate.bclc.com.
Gill, who immigrated to Canada from India in 1985, had been playing the lottery for years before his big win.
“I scanned my ticket at the Evergreen Mall (near 152nd Street and Fraser Highway in Surrey),” Gill said in January.
After winning the $2 million, Gill and his wife didn’t immediately tell their daughter about plans to make her dream wedding come true. “She will be very surprised,” said Gill, who planned to pay off some debt and tuck away half of the remaining winnings for the future.
Other “feel-good” stories shared by BCLC include a $24-million “dream” for an Aldergrove man who said he would donate some of his prize to BC Children’s Hospital and brain-cancer research, and a Delta woman who wanted to gift some of her $250,000 Daily Grand win to a local family.
Then there’s the Port Hardy lighthouse keeper who, after 20 years on the job, said he’d give some of his $1-million Lotto 6/49 winnings to his siblings and also step down from the job – except as a relief worker, when needed.
In 2020, BCLC says it paid out more than $691 million in prizes to lottery players in B.C.
Surrey’s Gill and others are featured in the video posted below.
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