On July 13, Alberta’s commercial iGaming market is set to open, increasing regulated online gambling offerings within the province. 

Alberta is following Ontario’s liberalization of its online gambling system which launched in April 2022. In the four years since Ontario’s system was launched, several challenges, both expected and unexpected, have emerged. 

Despite predictions the legal market would reduce black market gambling, the new regulated market instead attracted many new gamblers and increased overall gambling activity. Consequently, ConnexOntario, a helpline service for people facing issues around alcohol, drug, and gambling addictions as well as mental illness, has seen the average number of calls they receive about gambling from men aged 25-44 almost doubled, increasing by 99 percent, in the last three years. Among boys and men aged 15-24, it increased by 161 percent.

Beyond the consequences of increased gambling activity, and in response to rising complaints, the province has recently mused about placing restrictions on gambling advertising after the Ontario Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming called it a “growing issue”. Canadians are inundated with sports betting advertising during broadcasts; one study found that sports broadcasts have 2.8 references to sports betting per minute.

While the Alberta government has committed to moving forward with this expanded gambling market, it is not too late to implement policy changes which could best protect Albertans and leverage the lessons learned in Ontario – as the Alberta government did when they launched a centralized platform to help players limit their gambling, a recommendation we previously provided.

Recommendations:

1. Fully separate gambling revenue from general revenue, and redirect funds into addiction relief programs.
2. Restrict advertising for sports betting.
3. Ban in-game bets; at minimum, ban advertisements for in-game bets.
4. Make responsible-gambling messages more effective.
5. Require gambling corporations (including Crown agencies) to contribute more money to problem-gambling research, prevention, and treatment, and link these contributions to marketing spending.

For further reading on this topic, please see these reports:

Memo: Alberta’s Budget 2025 Consultation

Royally Flushed: Reforming Gambling to Work for, Not Against, Alberta

Cardus Presentation to Parliamentary Committee on Sports Betting

Memo: Senate Committee’s Study of Bill S-269 on Advertising for Sports Betting

Memo: The Effects of Sports Betting

Memo: Study of Bill S-211

How Big Is Canada’s Black Market for Sports Betting?

The Hidden Harms of Single-Event Sports Betting in Ontario

Policy Brief: Turning Aces Into Assets

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Renze Nauta
Cardus – Program Director, Work and Economics
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Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.

Appendix: Rationale for Recommendations

1. Fully separate gambling revenue from general revenue, and redirect funds into addiction relief programs.

As we recommended during the province’s 2025 budget consultations, gambling should not be understood as a voluntary tax but rather as a regressive tax on the poor. This is because Canadian and international research show that poorer households spend the highest proportion of their income on gambling. This is exacerbated by the fact that much of Alberta’s gambling revenue comes from the most addictive forms of gambling, namely slots and video lottery terminals.

The Government of Alberta should separate gambling revenue from general revenue. Particularly given Ontario’s example showed a large increase in calls to gambling help lines, these gambling revenues should then be directed to problem-gambling research, prevention, and treatment. Although 2% of gross gambling revenue in Alberta will be earmarked for First Nations and 1% for social responsibility, including gambling prevention, 20% of the remainder will go to general government revenues.

For more details see Royally Flushed: Reforming Gambling to Work for, Not Against, Alberta (Cardus, July 2020) and Turning Aces into Assets (Cardus, May 2021).

2. Restrict advertising for sports betting

In our 2024 report focused on Ontario’s sports gambling market, we recommended that sports betting ads be banned altogether or, at minimum, that these ads should be banned during sports broadcasts. With the Ontario government admitting it is considering advertising restrictions, the Alberta government should, at a minimum, adopt a “whistle-to-whistle” ban on sports-betting ads: no advertising during a live sports broadcast, starting at least five minutes before the game begins and ending at least five

3. Ban in-game bets; at minimum, ban advertisements for in-game bets

Removing in-game bets would go a long way toward making sports betting more like a lower-risk lottery drawing and less like a slot machine. Many of the features that make contemporary sports betting so dangerous—short intervals between bets, the ability to bet near-continuously throughout a game, high multiplier potential, near misses, opportunities to chase losses and bet impulsively—come from in-game bets. Eliminating these bets would be an important step toward protecting some of Ontario’s most vulnerable consumers, without limiting players’ access to safer formats.

4. Make responsible-gambling messages more effective

Adding a fine-print disclaimer, reminding consumers to gamble responsibly, to an advertisement that encourages these same consumers to spend more money on gambling is an ineffective way to prevent gambling-related harm. The province should invest in evidence-based strategies for improving its responsible-gambling messaging.

Again, gambling is a dangerous and addictive product and should be treated as such in provincial legislation. For example, it may be worth exploring responsible-gambling strategies that, like packaging on cigarettes, disclose to consumers the known risks associated with the product. This has the added benefit of giving players a more concrete understanding of what (ir)responsible play looks like: “Spending more than 1 percent of your pre-tax household income on gambling quadruples your risk of harm” is more direct than “Know your limit, play within it.”

5. Require gambling corporations (including Crown agencies) to contribute more money to problem-gambling research, prevention, and treatment, and link these contributions to marketing spending

There should be ongoing monitoring and measurement of gambling harm and the associated societal costs. If gambling providers (both private and state-owned entities) want to increase the volume of gambling in Ontario, they should cover the public-health costs associated with increased participation in a harmful activity. Every dollar spent on marketing gambling to Ontarians should be matched by a dollar contributed to the Ministry of Health, or to an arm’s length non-profit organization, for problem-gambling prevention and treatment initiatives.

This would not only make more funds available for those who need it most but also significantly curtail advertising. A sportsbook would need to double its marketing budget to run the same number of ads, thus cutting into profits; if it wanted to keep its marketing budget at the same level, it could run only half the number of ads with that money.