Last Thursday, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario announced a first for the provincial agency: they’re proposing to suspend, for five days, one of the companies licensed to operate an online gambling app in Ontario. The specific allegation against PointsBet Canada is a “systemic failure to properly monitor, detect, document and report suspicious betting patterns” related to the Jontay Porter scandal, in which the now-former NBA player opted out of games so gamblers could win bets — thus paying off his own gambling debts.
In their release, the AGCO notes that PointsBet has been sanctioned before for breaking Ontario’s gambling rules, and also states that it took PointsBet 18 months just to confirm whether it had allowed any of the impugned bets. Porter’s misconduct was discovered in 2024; it’s 2026 and the gears of regulatory enforcement are going to continue grinding away slowly. But Porter’s scandal was not the first, and has not been the last case of gambling scandals in sports — with both professional leagues and college sports in the U.S. falling victim.
Betting scandals are just the highest-profile problem with the explosion of sports gambling we’ve seen in both the U.S. and Canada. For Ontario, there’s the inescapable problem that this industry is also ruining lives. “This is an addictive behaviour, it resembles a lot of other behaviours where we regulate advertising,” says Renze Nauta, director of work and economics at Cardus Research, a conservative-leaning think tank in Hamilton. “The addictive character of it resembles both tobacco and alcohol, where we curtail or even outright ban advertising.”
Cardus published a pair of reports in 2024 on the rise of online gambling in Ontario, arguing that the social harms of sports betting were being ignored while the public benefits were being exaggerated. While a common guideline (including in provincial and federal publications) calls for individuals to spend no more than one per cent of their income on gambling, Ontario’s data suggests people registered with iGaming Ontario are commonly spending three times that much. Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health notes that the bulk of gambling revenues come from a small fraction of people who lose the most money — stressing both their bank accounts and their health, with sometimes fatal effects. One study in Sweden found that gambling disorder increased the risk of suicide by 15 times.
Meanwhile, one of the foundational justifications for legalizing sports gambling — that it would simply formalize betting that’s already occurring in black markets — is almost certainly false. Cardus’s research seems to demonstrate that a commonly-cited figure for the pre-legalization size of the black market in Canada ($10 billion) was very nearly invented out of thin air. We haven’t simply shifted an illegal informal activity to the legal, regulated and taxed world: we’ve substantially expanded its scope and availability. Or, to use the language of both Cardus and other public-health researchers: we’ve turned everyone’s smartphone into a slot machine, with predictable public health effects.
And yet, online gambling revenues have hardly been a windfall for the provincial treasury: in 2025-26, Ontario is projecting only $253 million in revenue from iGaming Ontario, about one tenth of what the province makes from conventional casino gambling and lotteries — or about what the entire provincial government spends before noon on any single day.
Online gambling revenues are growing faster than conventional gambling, but there’s an obvious trade-off there: if we’re already seeing the corrosive effects of online gambling in athletics and in people’s household finances, any benefits to the provincial treasury could at least arguably be offset by a diminished quality of life elsewhere. Those of us who enjoyed the Blue Jays’ season last year could be forgiven for being irritated at being forced to drink at a firehose of gambling ads, often with our kids in the room.
Nauta and his colleagues at Cardus are supportive of the calls made elsewhere for Canada to crack down on advertising for sports gambling — an issue my colleague Steve Paikin covered earlier this month.
“What we’re seeing is an advertising regime that is getting out of hand, and that’s leading to numbers that are getting out of hand in terms of how much money people are putting into it,” Nauta says. “It’s a dangerous activity in ways that people aren’t necessarily aware of.”
The federal Parliament is considering Bill S-211 that would require the government to create a policy around gambling advertising, and in principle, there are a number of rules and regulations around online gambling (including but not limited to sports) that could be implemented provincially as well, including banning in-game bets at a minimum.
I’d also argue, however, that while a ban on gambling advertisements is a good incremental step, it’s not going to go far enough. The explosion of online gambling has all happened in just a few years, and we still have a window of opportunity to roll this back if we want to. To put it another way, it’s possible for us as a society to simply recognize that we’ve made a mistake. There really is a difference between legalizing sports gambling as a concept and putting sports gambling on everyone’s phone at all times. Given how rapidly the industry has expanded since legalization, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that if we massively constricted it once again — just requiring people to put boots on and leave the house instead of betting from their couch — we’d see the same effect in reverse: people wouldn’t flee to online black markets, they’d simply stop gambling.
Functionally unlimited online gambling has already been corrosive in sports, and that was just the appetizer. So-called “prediction markets” are identical in practice to online gambling, and they’re already causing scandals in everything from elections to the war in Ukraine. Policymakers at every level of government need to take a good, hard look at controlling the explosion of these companies, instead of trying to cash in on them.