It’s been over two years since Parliament legalized single-event sports betting in Canada, leading to an explosion in gambling advertisements on sports broadcasts, social media, billboards and arenas. That law, bill C-218, passed with all-party support by a margin of 303-15 in 2021.
Max Silverstein, a student at the College of Sports Media in Toronto, now finds himself watching games that he previously had no interest in because the odds look favourable.
Betting has also changed his experience of watching games he always cared about.
“I would say that winning money isn’t more important than my team winning,” he said. “But sometimes I’ll ‘emotionally hedge’ and bet against the team I’m rooting for.”
Gambling can enhance the viewing experience, he says. But the explosion of gambling advertisements distracts from it.
Now, a new bill sponsored by a group of Canadian Olympians, academics, teachers and other sports leaders seeks to ban gambling ads entirely.
Grey market
Former Olympic runner Bruce Kidd says that gambling ads have turned watching sports broadcasts into a casino experience, damaging the integrity of sport and fostering addiction.
Kidd, who is professor emeritus in sport and public policy at the University of Toronto, is on the steering committee for the Campaign to Ban Ads in Gambling, a group advocating for gambling ads to be eliminated.
“The impetus for bill [C-218] was simply to regulate online gambling. There was no debate on the possibility of extensive advertising or the harm gambling advertisements might cause,” the campaign states in its white paper.
Kidd’s group is behind the push to pass bill S-269, which would create a national framework for gambling advertising in Canada. They would like to purge all gambling advertisements, but their white paper says a phased-in approach might be necessary given the “circumstances that have developed.”
Bill C-218 permitted the provinces to create their own frameworks to “control and manage” gambling on sports. Before 2021, it was legal only to bet on horse races or parimutuel bets and multiple game bets known as “parlays” through provincial lottery systems.
Meanwhile, the gambling industry is preparing for a fight to kill the proposed legislation.
Canada is already a leader in gambling regulation, says Paul Burns, president and CEO of the Canadian Gaming Association, a national trade association.
But for almost two decades, a “grey” market thrived, with Canadians every year pumping billions into foreign websites for other kinds of gambling, Burns says.
The market is considered grey because all gambling is illegal in Canada unless it is managed by the provincial governments. The foreign websites were doing something illegal, but they weren’t within reach of prosecution. And on the consumer side, it’s not illegal for Canadians to bet on a grey market website.
It was these websites where Canadians were able to place bets on whether the Calgary Flames would win or whether a certain player would score on any given night.
Internet changed everything
Bill C-218 amended the Criminal Code to remove the section that prohibited betting on “any race or fight or on a single sport event or athletic contest.” Ontario was the first province to capitalize on the change, creating a framework for single-event sports betting in April 2022. Dozens of sites previously operating in the grey market started to participate in Ontario’s regulated market.
The primary reason for legalization was so the Canadian industry could capture the revenue being lost to foreign companies, says Burns. Before bill C-218, about $1 billion in gambling operator profit was being sent abroad every year in Ontario alone, he says.
By comparison, in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, 1.6 million gamblers in Ontario made $35.5 billion in wagers, leading to $1.4 billion in operator revenue, according to iGaming Ontario, a government agency that manages internet gaming in the province. In lieu of GST on gambling, all licensed betting operators share 20 per cent of their revenue with iGaming.
The other provinces — but not the territories — followed suit to legalize single-game sports betting through their provincial lottery corporations. But they didn’t go as far as Ontario, which created a regulated framework for all online gambling.
That means bettors in those provinces can still access the grey market. Burns says his association has been encouraging all the provinces to regulate online gambling for more than a decade, because in the age of the internet, there is simply no way to prevent people from accessing these sites. The solution is to force the companies to operate in a regulated environment, where the provinces have a say in their operations and can share in their revenue, Burns says.
“There was a time when the provinces had monopolies on gambling in their jurisdiction. So if you wanted to buy a lottery ticket and go to a casino, it was the provincial government that was determining how you were going to do that. The internet changed everything,” said Burns.
Advertising ‘excessive’
There are 45 betting operators in Ontario running 76 different gambling websites. While Burns and Kidd say there’s no publicly available data, they both acknowledge that gambling companies spent a considerable amount on gambling ads in the first year of Ontario’s regulated market — and sports fans noticed.
An Ipsos poll in January found that 48 per cent of Canadians agreed with the statement that “the volume of advertising is excessive and needs to be cut back.” It also found that 63 per cent of Canadians agree there should be limits on the amount and placement of gambling advertising.
When bill C-218 was passed, the government didn’t anticipate “that the Canadian population would be subject to an unprecedented onslaught of gaming advertising in the print, electronic, and digital media,” Kidd’s group says.
But Burns claims that gambling advertisements aren’t even in the top ten that appear on TV, estimating they make up three to five per cent. Looking solely at sports broadcasts, Burns acknowledges the figure is higher, but couldn’t provide an estimate.
While the legislation Kidd has supported, S-269, makes its way through second reading, his group is suggesting Canada adopt a phased-in approach. Similar to a proposal before the Australian Parliament, this approach would ban all advertising within three years.
One of the arguments Kidd expects the industry to use in opposing the bill is free speech. His group is working on a counter argument:
“We are ensuring that the evidence of the health harms created by sports betting and gambling is absolutely solid,” said Kidd. “Because under the Canadian constitution, free speech can be overcome if there’s a compelling reason for well-being or public safety. It’s the argument that was used in the cases of tobacco and cannabis.”
According to Statistics Canada, “Nearly two thirds (64.5 per cent) of Canadians aged 15 or older (18.9 million) reported gambling in the past year, and 1.6 per cent of past-year gamblers (304,000) were at a moderate-to-severe risk of problems related to gambling.”
But to conflate tobacco and cannabis with gambling is “misplaced,” says Burns. He also rejects one of Kidd’s other arguments favouring S-269: that advertising is inducing minors to gamble.
“On Hockey Night in Canada, youth represent less than 15 per cent of the audience,” said Burns. “Kids don’t watch television. They’re watching streaming services and TikTok.”
Burns contends that the regulated market is actually what’s preventing minors from betting on sports. “It’s impossible for minors to access an Ontario-regulated site, given they have to provide a government issued ID: passport or driver’s license,” he said, adding that grey market sites only require an email address.
Kidd says his campaign is looking forward to a consultation phase for S-269, which they are expecting will come this December or January.
Thank you for this very informative article. It’s encouraging to see some movement on this issue. Gambling is like alcohol or cannabis or tobacco. History has proven that these things cannot be effectively banned, and it might be possible to enjoy them safely. However they are very dangerous, especially to kids, and can easily ruin lives. So it makes sense that gambling advertising, like ads for those other “vices” should be tightly regulated. For cannabis, the law allows industry to communicate to its consumers in various ways, but billboards, TV ads etc that can create a new generation of addicts are banned. Maybe we should consider applying the same sorts of rules to gambling ads.