A study published last month reported a 154-per-cent increase in gambling-related visits to emergency rooms by boys and men aged 10 to 29 across Ontario during the same period.Giordano Ciampini/The Canadian Press
Darragh McGee is the author of Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sports.
It is grimly ironic to think that it all began with “tech issues,” via a choppy live stream, on that “monumental” Monday of April 4, 2022, when Canada’s gambling establishment triumphantly gathered at the Toronto Stock Exchange to launch Ontario as the first province to permit a regulated online gambling market – or “iGaming” as they rebranded it.
True to form, the industry pitch was absurdly upbeat: iGaming Ontario would “encourage competition while incentivizing capital investment, job creation, and economic growth.” Paradoxically, for an extractive business model that only profits when people lose, all of this would be achieved while “protecting consumers and keeping Ontarians safe.” To that end, there was an earnest pledge to uphold “rigorous standards of game integrity, fairness, player protections and social responsibility,” with “controls preventing underage access and measures to enable more responsible gambling.”
Then the market launch buzzer sounded, confetti streamed down, and the cutthroat realities of recruiting and retaining bettors in an increasingly crowded, tech-fuelled marketplace instantly kicked in.
What happened next depends on who you ask. Industry-friendly business pages proudly hail Ontario as the single most competitive gambling market in North America – by which they mean that it has the highest concentration of private companies, with 49 licensed brands operating 84 online platforms today. Record-breaking revenues also dominate headlines, including news of $4-billion yearly revenue in 2025, a 34-per-cent increase on 2024 alone. Overall, the $10-billion barrier has already been broken since April, 2022. The tax yield during that same period exceeds $2-billion. On that front, the origin pledge of free-flowing capital and jobs has been delivered on, and then some.
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Yet as Ontarians are learning amid a wave of new research published on the once-hidden human costs behind this relentless growth trajectory, it is unwise to trust the platitudes and pledges of a provincial government or a sporting fraternity in partnership with a known addictive industry that causes life-altering harm on a societal scale. That essential conflict of interest makes a mockery of empty pledges to “keep Ontarians safe.” In reality, the promised guardrails don’t even protect the province’s children and teenagers.
The findings from the latest Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, published by Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, lay this bare. In a sample of 11,000 students enrolled in Grades 7 to 12 across the province, more than 80 per cent reported having seen or heard an online gambling advert in the past month. Roughly a quarter reported exposure daily. None of those surveyed were legally entitled to bet.
Not coincidentally, a quarter also admitted spending five or more hours a day on social-media platforms, which not only account for an ever-increasing share of overall gambling marketing spend, but house some of the industry’s invasive forms of digital surveillance and behavioural targeting too. Data are the primary asset of virtually every online business model today, and gambling brands are leading the way. Algorithms track our every move online and aggregate vast troves of granular data that can be used to profile our behavioural attributes and even target our vulnerabilities. Propensity to gamble and susceptibility to marketing are but two of the attributes that feed into customer profiles that can be used to profitable effect.
Concerningly, the behavioural effects of exposure to marketing are already evidenced among students, 12 per cent of whom reported gambling online – a 50-per-cent jump in two years – with boys significantly more likely to participate, and sports betting increasing twofold between Grade 7 and 12.
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A related survey from the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada, published in June, also found that 50 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds participated in some form of online gambling over the past year, with more than one-third (37 per cent) indicating that marketing influenced them to place a wager.
And wager they have, to the tune of $82.7-billion in 2024-25, a 31-per-cent annual increase that is on course to be shattered again this year. The FIFA World Cup alone sparked a $1-billion bumper yield from sports betting in June, 2026, including legions of first-time casual bettors who downloaded apps, linked their bank account, and consented to the dark nudges of a digital architecture that is not only designed to convert sports fans into gamblers, but to cross-sell them even more ruinously addictive casino products. This is one of the uncomfortable truths that lurk beneath the clean-cut veneer of sports gambling today: It is but the recruitment ground and the gateway to the viciously predictable outcomes of the online casino.
Let that sink in: An entire new generation of smartphone-savvy Ontarians are never more than a few clicks away from activating a casino slot machine in their pockets. For the record, such cross-selling feeds into an online casino market that topped $8-billion in June – eight times that of the World Cup betting fever.
If none of this previously induced concern, it’s not altogether surprising. Whether we know it or not, many of us have been subconsciously conditioned to accept “iGaming” as a mainstream entertainment sector, a legitimate part of sport media and fandom, and therefore a normalized feature of modern society. We’ve also been schooled to accept industry manufactured labels like “responsible gambling” and “problem gambling,” both of which act as a smokescreen, individualizing harm and addiction at every turn, diverting the gaze of governments and policy makers away from the promotional culture, product design and business practices of the gambling industry. In Ontario, as elsewhere, that has too often led to public-health harms being narrowly attributed to flawed psychology, individual deviance, or irresponsibility.
An urgent reckoning with such harms must be a priority for Ontarians going forward. After all, evidence of “clinically significant harms” is corroborated by a series of studies by researchers at the University of Toronto, including findings published by the Canadian Medical Association Journal of a “substantial increase” in gambling-related calls to ConnexOntario, the province’s mental health and addictions helpline, since April, 2022. Most concerningly, they reported that helpline contacts skyrocketed by 317 per cent among boys and men aged 15 to 24.
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Allied to this was a study published last month that reported a 154-per-cent increase in gambling-related visits to emergency rooms by boys and men aged 10 to 29 across Ontario during the same period. The authors not only flagged the comorbidity of mental health conditions, including depression, alcohol use or self-harm among those affected, but found they were more likely to live in the lowest-income neighbourhoods.
A landmark report by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction also found that 69.4 per cent of young adults aged 18 to 29 who gambled online met the criteria for harmful gambling, with a quarter reporting serious harm such as income loss, debt and relationship conflict. Compared to lottery products, online gambling was 45 times more likely to lead to harm.
No doubt many reading this will have their own anecdotal tales of affected family members, friends or colleagues who opted to conceal their harm, suffering in silence and internalizing the stigma that still shrouds gambling, which was only formally ratified as the first behavioural addiction in 2014. Still, today, reliable statistics on the true prevalence of gambling harm remain elusive to all but the private limited companies who sit atop a mountain of granular propriety data that could be used by clinicians and researchers to pinpoint where harm is most concentrated and guide intervention when certain patterns are identified.
This is the elephant in the room when it comes to preventing the dangers posed by the digital rebirth of gambling, the complicity of professional sports and the conveyor belt of high-octane products that are subject to no independent safety assessment as a condition of licensing. It is contingent on ending a partnership model which renders the provincial government dependent on industry revenue streams and thereby disincentivized to put public health before profit margins.
Achieving that is no small feat, but Ontarians are not alone. Across the Atlantic in Europe – and south of the Canadian border – the movement for gambling reform is increasingly nested in a wider political and legal concern with online safety, surveillance capitalism and digital consent processes. As with the backlash against Big Tech and social-media platforms – many of which have been ruled as “harmful and defective” – a robust legal reckoning may be the principal mechanism of holding sport, government and their gambling partners to account.
Until then, there is no silver bullet for the risk-filled predicament which Ontarians find themselves in, but at least the unsustainably short-sighted, greed-ridden nature of the economic model underpinning it is being exposed for what it is. Just short of five years in, however, it’s difficult not to wager on the quantum of harm escalating still further before public consciousness reaches a critical tipping point. Lives as much as livelihoods, we now know, are on the line.