In 2022, the Ford government opened Ontario’s private online gambling market and promised a safe, regulated, responsible alternative to proliferating offshore sites.
Four years later Ontario has engineered the fastest commercialization and normalization of addiction infrastructure in Canadian history, while failing to deliver on their own promises to protect players and secure a better deal for the public.
Within months of taking office in 2018, Doug Ford’s campaign vice chair Chris Froggatt launched a lobbying firm called Loyalist Public Affairs and registered Stars Group, the operators of PokerStars as his first client. Ford’s senior campaign strategist Kory Teneycke set up Rubicon Strategy (100M in SDF grant money), while his long-time associate and former PC Party Vice President Patrick Harris registered to lobby for the Canadian Online Gambling Alliance, representing 3 offshore gambling companies, GVS, Bet365, and Microgaming.
The offshore sites the Tories promised to rein in effectively helped shape Ontario’s online gambling regulator.
Multinational operators and their lobbyists and trade groups repeatedly screamed from the rooftops that Ontario needed a privatized online gambling model to bring a $10B black market out of the shadows, but research from the Cardus Institute suggests this figure was built on a chain of foreign guesstimates laundered through lobbying materials until politicians repeated these figures as facts. Cardus found that the magic $10B number was never a solid estimate of Ontario’s underground market, but rather a speculative figure imported from another country, repackaged to sell the public on a model that would hand over most online gambling revenue to private profit while dramatically expanding the scope of legal gambling.
Ontario’s casino contractors warned the Ford government this new model could cost the public coffers up to $500 million a year in lost revenue. The Ford government had already made sure no one would be there to raise the alarm: in 2019, three years before the market opened, it quietly cut the entire budget of GREO (Gambling Research Exchange Ontario), the province's independent gambling research body, ensuring the expansion would proceed without independent public health scrutiny. Subsequently after its launch in April 2022, Ontario’s Auditor General flagged five major recommendations on iGaming governance. The Conservative government ignored each of them.
Under the open iGaming system, Ontario settles for 20% of online gambling revenue, a far cry from the 55% share it collects from brick‑and‑mortar casinos. Ontario’s 2025-2026 budget documents projected $253 million dollars in net income from iGaming, nothing compared to the billions the province rakes in annually from conventional casino and lottery operations.
A landmark study analyzing more than 745,000 contacts to Ontario's 24-hour mental-health and addictions helpline from 2012-2025 was recently published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Researchers found gambling related calls skyrocketed by 96% after the private market opened. Among boys and young men aged 15 to 24, the group most inundated with sports advertising, monthly calls surged by more than 317%. By 2025, 76% of all gambling helpline contacts were specifically for online gambling. Lead researcher Dr. Daniel Myran of the University of Ottawa noted that most people with gambling disorders never seek help, meaning helpline data always significantly underestimates the true scale of the problem.
A separate study by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction found nearly one in four young adults aged 18 to 29 who gambled online in 2024 reported experiencing gambling-related harm. The Cardus Institute found the average Ontario sports betting account spends an average of $283 a month, more than three times the safe threshold set by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.
Instead of addressing the rapidly escalating public health crisis, Premier Ford has envisioned plans for expanding the Igaming market even further through open‑liquidity, allowing Ontarians to play poker and sports bets against people in other countries. Ford has also mused about turning Niagara Falls into a “Vegas‑of‑the‑North”, courting Las Vegas megaresorts and demanding that existing operators either stay on board or be replaced.
Officially, the province continues to insist it has everything under control. Under the Alcohol Gaming Commission Ontario’s (AGCO) Registrar’s Standards and iGaming Ontario’s operating agreements, operators must register, display helpline numbers, run responsible‑gambling campaigns, and get RG Check accreditation from the Responsible Gambling Council. Actual government funding for problem gambling programming is minimal. The AGCO’s Education, Training and Awareness fund is financed out of monetary penalties assessed against licensees, and has distributed only tens of thousands of dollars in individual grants. iGaming Ontario does not manage a unified self exclusion system across all operators, and operators must provide their own self‑exclusion programs that meet the regulator’s baseline standards. The province funds a laughable patchwork of treatment and prevention while the iGaming market continues with token campaigns.
Clearly, a genuine public‑health approach would shift the burden of responsibility from blaming individual Ontarians being bombarded with unprecedented predatory advertising to examining the system normalizing addiction. Instead, the Ford government has spent 2 years blocking opposition attempts to fight this fire.
In June 2023, NDP MPPs France Gélinas, Lisa Gretzky, Tom Rakocevic, and Monique Taylor tabled Bill 126, the Ban iGaming Advertising Act, a private member’s bill that would have outlawed online gambling ads across TV, radio, public transit, and digital platforms, with fines of up to $1 million for violators. Ford’s supermajority never let the bill survive, but the political pressure it generated forced the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario to ban the use of active athletes and most celebrities in iGaming ads, explicitly citing the need to protect young people. The Commission still lets operators buy an unlimited number of ad slots on the same screens, and the ACGO still allows athletes and celebrities to appear in gambling ads, if the focus is on advocating for responsible gambling practices.
This loophole allows culture-bending superstars like Connor McDavid to make millions starring in gambling adverts, so long as they tout “bet responsibly.” These commercials are still hooking people, and significantly influencing underage audiences, just as alcohol ads that say “drink responsibly” don’t stop people from drinking. Activists in Edmonton have directly lobbied McDavid to step away from these ads.
Ontario NDP MPP Tom Rakocevic says the government’s refusal to act has exacerbated the crisis, particularly among young people.
"There's been a real explosion in online gambling ads," Rakocevic told me. "We know that young people continue to be heavily targeted, and we have seen an increase in the number of individuals seeking help for mental health and addiction support related to gambling." With youth unemployment now at 17 percent, 10 points above the national average, and OSAP grants recently cut, Rakocevic says expanding gambling in this moment "just doesn't make sense." The Ford government, he says, has "missed the mark once again when it comes to actually improving consumer protection in Ontario."
It is clear the Ford government made a deliberate political calculus of extraction from the most vulnerable Ontarians, opening the gates to a Trojan Horse of private capital that now compels us to sit through 2.8 gambling ads every minute of a hockey broadcast. The consequences of these choices are playing out in real time.
This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times. Read our Content Policy here.
