Five years after Parliament decriminalized single-game wagering, Canada has a multibillion-dollar online market, a mounting public-health bill and exactly one province that has opened its doors to competition.
- Bill C-218 received royal assent on June 29, 2021 and took effect that August, letting provinces offer single-game sports betting for the first time after decades of parlay-only rules.
- Ontario, still the only province with an open competitive market, recorded $82.7 billion in wagers and $2.9 billion in gaming revenue in its most recent audited year and paid $181 million in dividends to the province.
- Online casino games, not sports, drive that market. Casino accounted for 84 percent of Ontario wagers and 75 percent of revenue, a fact largely missing from the political debate.
- A March 2026 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found gambling-related help-line contacts from Ontario men aged 15 to 24 rose 317 percent after privatization, with slot machines, not sports, the most common reason for calls.
- Alberta becomes the second open market on July 13, while every other province keeps its lottery monopoly and a federal bill to rein in betting advertising sits before the House of Commons.
TORONTO – The story of legal sports betting in Canada turns exactly five years old on June 29. On that date in 2021, a private member’s bill received royal assent and ended a prohibition that had stood for decades, clearing the way for provinces to take bets on the outcome of a single game. The change was small on paper and large in effect. Five years on, it has produced a multibillion-dollar industry, a body of evidence about who gets hurt and a map of the country that is still mostly unchanged.
What the Law Actually Changed
The reform was narrow and specific. Bill C-218, a private member’s bill from Conservative MP Kevin Waugh, passed the Senate 57-20 on June 22, 2021 and received royal assent a week later. It took effect on Aug. 27, 2021. All it did was strike a few words from the Criminal Code, removing the ban on betting on a single sporting event while leaving horse racing under federal control. Before the change, Canadians could bet legally only on parlays, which require picking the outcome of two or more games at once.
The point was never to invent a new appetite. It was to capture one that already existed. When the federal government set the law in motion, it cited industry estimates that Canadians were spending about $10 billion a year on single-game bets through illegal channels and another $4 billion through offshore websites beyond any provincial reach. The major professional leagues, which had long opposed betting on their games, lined up behind the bill in 2020. The promise attached to it was straightforward: pull that money into a regulated system, protect consumers and send the proceeds to public coffers. Whether Canadian online sportsbooks could deliver on all three at once is the question the past five years have started to answer.
Ontario Became the Proof of Concept
Only one province took the full step. Ontario launched a competitive private market on April 4, 2022, through a new agency, iGaming Ontario, that signs operators as its agents while the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario regulates them. It opened with 12 operators. By the end of its most recent audited year it had 50.
The numbers are large. In the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2025, Ontarians wagered $82.7 billion and produced $2.9 billion in gaming revenue, a 32 percent jump in wagers and a 31 percent rise in revenue, according to iGaming Ontario’s audited annual report. The agency paid $181 million in dividends to the province and set aside $41.45 million for First Nations under a revenue-sharing agreement. By its own survey, 83.7 percent of players said they used regulated sites, short of the 90 percent the province wants by 2027. The market has only grown since. Counted by calendar year, iGaming Ontario’s monthly data put 2025 wagering near $98 billion.
One number reframes the rest. The market legalized in the name of sports betting is, by revenue and by volume, a casino. Online casino games accounted for 84 percent of wagers and 75 percent of revenue in Ontario’s latest year. Sports betting produced $654 million in revenue, less than a third of the casino total. For all the attention paid to online gambling in Ontario as a sports product, the slot machine is the engine.
The Bill Coming Due
The clearest accounting of the human cost arrived this spring. In a study published March 2, 2026 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers tracked contacts to ConnexOntario, the province’s free mental health and addictions help line, from January 2012 through September 2025. They found that gambling-related contacts from boys and men aged 15 to 24 rose 317 percent between the years before Ontario’s first online platform and the period after the market opened to private operators. Contacts from men aged 25 to 44 rose 108 percent. The rates had been stable before the policy changes.
The same study complicates the political conversation. The product driving the most help-seeking was not sports betting. Electronic gaming machines accounted for 46 percent of gambling-related contacts and table games for 25 percent. Sports betting, the activity the law and most of the debate are built around, accounted for 12 percent. Dr. Daniel Myran, the study’s senior author, said the steepest increases landed on the group most heavily targeted by sports betting marketing, and warned that people with gambling disorders face a high risk of self-harm. The authors were careful to note that help-line contacts measure people reaching out, which can rise from greater awareness as well as greater harm. Either way, the line on the graph bends in one direction.
Alberta Is Act Two
The expansion is not finished. On July 13, Alberta becomes the second province to open a competitive market, using a framework borrowed almost whole from Ontario. The iGaming Alberta Act passed in 2025, the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission opened registration on Jan. 13, 2026, and a new Crown corporation, the Alberta iGaming Corporation, will manage the commercial side. More than 40 operators had registered by early June, paying a $50,000 application fee and $150,000 a year for each site, and they will compete with the government’s incumbent platform, PlayAlberta.
Alberta has copied most of Ontario’s rules, including the ban on using athletes in gambling ads, but it has drawn one line Ontario did not. The provincial regulator amended its internet gaming standards to prohibit bets on political events, including elections and leadership races, a first among Canada’s regulated markets. For a province preparing to welcome dozens of operators into online gambling in Alberta, it is a small but pointed signal about where it wants the limits to sit.
The Unfinished Business
Everywhere else, the map looks much as it did in 2021. British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan still funnel online play through the government-run PlayNow platform, and Quebec runs its own. Private operators have lobbied British Columbia to follow Ontario, but the province has said it has no plans to change. Five years after the federal door opened, only Ontario runs an open market, with Alberta set to become the second on July 13.
The other piece of unfinished business is advertising, the most visible and most criticized byproduct of legalization. Ontario already bars operators from using active or retired athletes and celebrities who appeal to minors in their ads, a rule the AGCO brought in on Feb. 28, 2024. Ottawa is now weighing a national version. The National Framework on Sports Betting Advertising Act cleared the Senate in October and passed a House of Commons vote in April, sending it to committee for study. It would not ban betting ads outright, but would direct the federal heritage minister to write rules limiting their volume, their reach and the use of famous faces. The Canadian Gaming Association opposes it, arguing that provincial regulators already do the job, and neither Ontario nor Alberta supports it.
That tension runs through the whole five-year record. The activity the law was named for is a modest slice of a market dominated by online casinos. The harm signal is loudest among the young men the marketing chases hardest, and it traces more to slots than to sportsbooks. And the system keeps expanding, province by province, faster than the rules meant to contain it. The first five years built the market. The next five will test whether Canada can manage it.
