John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
Behind the bluster, politics and prescriptions for Canada’s ailing economy are 36,256 stories about the toll financial stress is taking on the people of this country.
That is the number of consumer insolvencies filed between July and September this year, 29 per cent above the four-year average for the same period, according to the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals (CAIRP). The accelerating numbers of Canadians who can no longer pay their creditors is a stark measure of the times.
Bankruptcies are often put down to bad luck, bad judgment, a poor economy or all three. Yet there is growing evidence to suggest another factor is at play too, particularly in Ontario: the unabashed complicity in normalizing, profiting from and promoting online gambling, a form of financial fentanyl for some that ruins lives. If ever there was a time to step back and re-evaluate, it is now.
In 2021 the federal government concluded that “Canadians understand that single event sport betting should take place in a safe and regulated environment, while also supporting good, well-paying jobs.” This was the rationale for Bill C-218, which decriminalized single event sport betting.
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The following year, Ontario established the province’s regulated, iGaming Ontario (iGO) market, which allows private gambling businesses to offer online gambling, including sports betting and casino games such as poker that can be played using a smartphone.
Multinational corporations moved in to set up shop in Ontario and offer online gambling. The province’s market is now saturated with 49 of these operators, “making Ontario the most competitive jurisdiction in North America,” according to iGO.
With the most competition comes relentless advertising. One academic study showed that “the average number of gambling references per broadcast minute was 2.8” in Ontario during sporting events. High-velocity gaming products, such as in-play betting and casino games such as slots, and live table betting that encourage continuous wagering are relentlessly promoted, the kind of games that can be addictive and that doctors say are harmful.
The advertising works, as iGO attested to in its 2023-2024 annual report, in which it boasted that “86% of Ontario’s online gamblers play on regulated sites.” Success has channelled existing and new gamblers into Ontario’s regulated market and outsized the social impact of online gambling by normalizing it as “safe.”
This is evident in the astonishing sums Ontarians are wagering. Between April, 2024, and March, 2025, the bets made through iGO operators totalled almost $83-billion. The operators themselves generated revenue from this that exceeded $3-billion, a 31-per-cent increase over the previous fiscal year.
According to Health Canada, 7 per cent of Canadians present a high risk of problem gambling; that number is 15 per cent for 18-to-34 year-olds. Now Ontario wants to export its online gaming internationally and won a court case last week to do just that.
Prior to the launch of iGO, Ontario’s Problem Gambling Helpline data indicated that 34.2 per cent of callers identified online gambling as their source of distress. A year after iGO opened its regulated market, that number increased to 50 per cent, with the largest cohort of callers being 25-to-34-year-olds, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds.
Interestingly, insolvencies filed in Ontario surged in the two years after iGO launched in 2022 compared to other provinces, according to CAIRP and data from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy (OSB).
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Ontario’s gambling problem exacerbates financial distress caused by the larger, macroeconomic issues the province and the country face. For some, online gambling piles more debt upon existing debts and contributes to insolvency, a reality that many trustees in insolvency witness as the number of people crossing their thresholds continues to grow.
Yet both Ontario and the federal government appear willfully blind to online gambling’s effect on the financial well-being of Canadians. The OSB, as well as Ontario, for instance, should require insolvency trustees to declare if gambling debts caused or contributed to personal insolvencies. That data would reveal the true costs of online gambling.
Importantly, online gambling needs to be fully integrated into financial literacy programs, something the Ontario government has not done at the high school level and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada completely ignored in its five-year financial literacy strategy for the country.
We can’t afford to bet that the effect of online gambling is immaterial, especially at a time of growing economic distress.