Wealthsimple and Kalshi have brought prediction markets to Canadian investors, but securities regulators have walled off the sports and election contracts that power the boom south of the border, leaving Canada with a halfway version of the fastest-growing product in betting.
- Wealthsimple launched Wealthsimple Predict on June 18 through a partnership with the US exchange Kalshi, giving Canadians roughly 4,000 event contracts on economic, financial and climate outcomes.
- Sports and political contracts are excluded, even though sports drive the vast majority of Kalshi’s US activity, because Canadian regulators have not approved them.
- In Canada, prediction markets are policed as financial products by securities regulators, not as gambling by bodies like Ontario’s AGCO, which is the core difference from sports betting.
- Polymarket remains barred from Ontario after a 2025 settlement and a $200,000 penalty, yet was recently caught handing out flyers outside Blue Jays games.
- Critics call the products gambling by another name, and one researcher notes the Canadian version may not tempt many bettors precisely because the sports markets are missing.
TORONTO – Prediction markets, the fastest-growing product in online betting, finally have a regulated home in Canada. They just arrived without the part most bettors actually want.
On June 18, Toronto-based Wealthsimple announced it was rolling out Wealthsimple Predict, a standalone app built on the US exchange Kalshi that lets Canadians trade roughly 4,000 event contracts. What it does not let them do is wager on a single game or an election, the exact contracts that turned Kalshi and its rival Polymarket into a multibillion-dollar phenomenon in the United States.
What Wealthsimple Predict Offers
The app is limited by design. Canadians can trade contracts tied to economic indicators, financial markets and climate outcomes, the only categories the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization has authorized. CIRO cleared Wealthsimple to offer event contracts in late March, making it one of only two CIRO dealer members allowed to do so, alongside Interactive Brokers. The contracts themselves come from Kalshi, the US exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which now offers event trading in about 140 countries. Wealthsimple pitched the move as filling a gap, with co-founder Brett Huneycutt describing prediction markets as the fastest-growing segment of global financial markets and saying Canadians had until now had only limited access. The product is starting in beta, with the company describing a summer rollout.
Why the Sports Bets Are Missing
The absence of sports is the whole story. In the United States, sports are the engine of the boom: by one congressional estimate, they made up roughly 87 percent of the nearly $40 billion Kalshi traded in the year to early 2026. Canada has fenced them off, and the reason is regulatory architecture rather than squeamishness. Here, prediction markets are treated as financial products overseen by securities regulators, not as gambling overseen by bodies like Ontario’s Alcohol and Gaming Commission. That is the mirror image of how sports betting works, where the AGCO and iGaming Ontario license operators under the Criminal Code. So the same Yes or No wager on a soccer result can be a regulated bet at a licensed sportsbook and a prohibited financial product on a prediction market, depending on who is offering it.
That split has consequences. In an April 2 notice, the Canadian Securities Administrators and CIRO reminded the industry to comply with registration rules or face enforcement, and noted that no prediction market platform has been recognized as an exchange or registered as a dealer in the country. There is also a deeper wrinkle that makes Canada different from the United States. South of the border, the CFTC claims exclusive federal jurisdiction over event contracts and is locked in court fights with state gambling regulators who call the products disguised sports betting. In Canada, by contrast, no federal regulator asserts that kind of exclusive jurisdiction, securities lawyer Evan Thomas told Casino.org, which means the path forward is murkier. In theory, he suggested, a prediction market could one day become a registered online gambling operator in a province like Ontario or Alberta, though that would require everyone to agree the products are legal under the Criminal Code and might need new legislation.
The Polymarket Problem
The cautionary tale behind all this caution is Polymarket. In a 2025 settlement with the Ontario Securities Commission, the platform’s operators, Blockratize and Adventure One, admitted they had offered banned binary options to Ontario investors between June 2020 and May 2023. Under Ontario rules, a Yes or No contract that settles in under 30 days with a fixed payout is a prohibited binary option, and the regulator concluded that is exactly what Polymarket was selling. The operators agreed to a $200,000 administrative penalty, $25,000 in investigation costs and a roughly $23,000 US voluntary payment, along with a two-year market ban. Polymarket has geo-blocked Ontario since 2023 and, under the deal, must keep the province walled off until at least April 2027.
Enforcement, though, is leaky. Polymarket is now an official Major League Baseball partner, and flyers promoting it were handed out outside Blue Jays games in Toronto despite the Ontario ban, with the team saying it was unaware of the giveaway. The overlap between a national league sponsorship and a provincial ban is an enforcement question regulators have not publicly resolved. Outside Ontario, the picture is greyer still, since Canadians elsewhere can reach the platform, and some Ontario users try to slip the block with a VPN. The episode is a reminder that, for now, the cleanest legal way to place a sports wager in the province remains a regulated operator, the same logic that underpins online gambling in Ontario.
Is It Gambling?
That is the question regulators and researchers keep circling. To critics, trading a contract on whether a team wins is a bet in everything but name, with added risks of insider trading and price manipulation. Those risks are not hypothetical: in one widely reported case, a US service member pleaded not guilty to using classified information about a mission to capture Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, then placing a Polymarket trade that won more than $400,000 US. The scale is real too, with Kalshi and Polymarket together handling around $24 billion in combined monthly global volume as of April, according to a Pew Research Center analysis cited by CBC News.
The irony for Canada is that the watered-down version may please no one. Andrew Kim, a psychology professor and gambling addictions expert at Toronto Metropolitan University, told CBC News that a sports-free prediction app is unlikely to entice many gamblers in the first place. And the consumer-protection argument cuts both ways. Shutting out a regulated sports version, Thomas argued, simply pushes Canadians toward unregulated markets, which is the same case the industry makes for licensing offshore books into the legal system rather than leaving bettors to the grey market through regulated Canada sportsbooks. For now, Canadians get prediction markets on inflation and interest rates, and a hard line against the contracts they are most likely to want.
What to watch next is whether that line holds. The CSA and CIRO have promised further guidance, and have reserved the right to tighten the terms on the two members already approved. The bigger question is whether anyone builds a legal path to sports event contracts in Canada, or whether the boom keeps washing up against a border the regulators are determined to hold.
