Toronto Blue Jays fans watch Game 7 of the Word Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers in a bar in Vancouver in November.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
John Macfarlane is a retired magazine editor.
Bruce Kidd is a retired professor of sports policy.
The people who write the stories you read in the sports pages of this newspaper are journalists. No one tells them what to write. Anyone who tried, including and perhaps especially the newspaper’s owners, would be rebuffed. As journalists they believe it’s their job to inform without fear or favour. To tell their readers not only what they want to know but, as well, what they need to know. They may be imperfect, like all of us – doctors, lawyers, politicians, even faith leaders – but they try to pursue not their own interests but those of their listeners, viewers and readers. In short, they’re not shills. If they’re trying to sell anyone anything, it’s the facts.
We assume this is also true of the people who broadcast professional sport, but it’s not. From its earliest days, the people who worked on- and off-air for Hockey Night in Canada were employed not by the CBC, which broadcast the games, but by the company that bought the broadcasting rights from the National Hockey League teams that owned them.
So in 1962, when Scott Young, Neil’s father and a columnist for The Globe and Mail, offended John Bassett, who owned the Toronto Telegram and was the largest shareholder in Maple Leaf Gardens, Mr. Bassett was able to have him sacked as a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada.
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A similar fate awaited Dick Beddoes, The Globe’s outspoken sports columnist when CTV was about to launch a weekly show called Sports Hot Seat in 1964. Johnny Esaw, the network’s consultant, wanted Mr. Beddoes to be a panelist, but it was not to be. Mr. Bassett, then CTV’s major shareholder, told Mr. Esaw to forget it.
That was then, you might think. Surely things have changed. But sadly they haven’t, and there’s no more glaring proof than the gambling industry’s hijacking of professional sports broadcasts. Until recently, most of us understood that because the house always wins gambling is a tax on the poor, and that gambling is dangerous because it’s addictive, although what we perhaps didn’t appreciate when online gambling was legalized in Canada in 2021 is that gambling is among the hardest addictions to overcome and that suicide is the leading cause of death among patients with a gambling disorder.
So it’s alarming that it’s now impossible to watch a televised NHL hockey game without being assaulted by a tsunami of advertisements promoting these harms. The ads would be troubling enough, but what’s worse is the seemingly willing involvement of sportscasters themselves. We have heard intermission commentators enthusiastically discuss their bets, while the scroll at the bottom of the screen shows the odds on all the games in play across the league. It normalizes betting as a component of the game, as if the hockey – and it’s other sports, too – weren’t entertainment enough.
Is it possible they aren’t aware of the harms they’re causing? If so, it’s willful ignorance, because according to the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse and Addiction, the percentage of Canadians experiencing symptoms of problem gambling – addiction, financial stress and mental-health challenges, even suicide – is 9.9 per cent, higher than any previous Canadian survey. The number of problem gamblers among young men between the ages of 18 and 29 who gamble online is now a staggering 69.4 per cent.
The respected British medical journal, The Lancet, calls gambling addiction “a threat to public health.” Canada is behind much of the world in addressing it. Japan, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Lithuania all have bans or restrictions on gambling advertising as a way to reduce the harms, while Germany has instituted a daytime ban, the Netherlands has restricted advertising in public places, and Britain has a voluntary “whistle-to-whistle” ban.
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No wonder British broadcasting regulator Michael Grade, testifying in the Canadian Senate in 2024, described Canada as being “on the lower slopes of a mountain to climb.”
But we’ve made a start. Bill S-211 (An Act Respecting a National Framework on Sports Betting), initiated by Olympic leader and Senator Marty Deacon, has been passed by the Senate and is now before the House of Commons. If passed, the bill would require the federal government to identify measures to regulate sports betting advertising to restrict such ads, limiting their “number, scope or location,” and restricting or banning celebrity or athlete endorsement; identify ways to promote research into minors involved in harmful gambling and to support those people; and set out national standards for the prevention and diagnosis of harmful gambling and addiction.
We expect the new regulations to prohibit sports broadcasters from promoting bets.
We know the Canadian people are onside, because polls continue to show they are. The most recent, conducted by Leger in September, 2025, found that 75 per cent of Canadians think there are too many gambling ads and 51 per cent that sports broadcasters should not be allowed to ally with betting companies. Our challenge is to translate these opinions into political action and convince Parliament to take on gambling the way it took on tobacco. It didn’t ban smoking, because that wouldn’t have worked. Instead, it banned advertising cigarettes, which has produced remarkable results. And therein lies a solution for gambling; not to ban it, which wouldn’t work, but to ban advertising that promotes it, including the endorsements of broadcasters, which will.
In 2018, an estimated 300,000 Canadians were at moderate-to-severe risk of becoming problem gamblers. Today, thanks to government-sanctioned gambling advertising, the number is much higher, perhaps as high as four million.
That’s almost the population of Alberta, more than the populations of any Canadian city, including Toronto. Think about multiples of the number of people who watch a Blue Jays game in Rogers Stadium. And then think about their families. If we fail to pass Bill S-211, those will be the numbers of hapless people we’ll have abandoned to the careless greed of the advertisers who think they’re doing their part by saying over and over again – and disingenuously, of course – “Please gamble responsibly.”