Canada has no single gambling regulator, and reading it as one national market is the most common mistake made about it. Section 207 of the Criminal Code makes a lottery scheme lawful only where it is conducted and managed by a province, so regulation sits with the provinces and territories and the answer to almost every question about Canada is province-specific. The federal change that mattered was Bill C-218, the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act, which received Royal Assent on 29 June 2021 and came into force on 27 August 2021. It amended section 207(4)(b) to let provinces offer betting on single sporting events, which had previously been prohibited. Horse racing remains federally governed. Only Ontario has opened to private operators, through the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario and iGaming Ontario, from April 2022. Elsewhere online gambling is offered by provincial Crown operators, so a licence in Ontario gives access to Ontario and nothing else.
An Ontario licence is not a Canadian licence. Every other province is a separate regime, and most are Crown monopolies.
Criminal Code, Part VII (Disorderly Houses, Gaming and Betting)
Whether a second province follows Ontario into an open licensed model is the question the industry keeps asking, and no province has committed. Alberta has moved furthest in signalling intent.
The province and the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations have amended their Gaming Framework Agreement to keep the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority's PlayNow.com as the only legal online operator for another three years, add 49 slot machines to SIGA's allocation and approve a First Nations gaming centre pilot at Flying Dust First Nation.
FINTRAC penalised New Brunswick and Nova Scotia's state-owned gaming bodies for failing to file suspicious transaction reports. The red flags it lists are a working checklist for anyone running a player account system.
Canada's securities regulators declined jurisdiction over sports event contracts on Thursday. By Friday British Columbia had picked it up, naming Kalshi and Polymarket and calling their sports and entertainment products illegal. That is the sequence operators should be watching.
Canada's securities regulators have declined to bring sports and entertainment event contracts inside the securities framework, and told their dealer members not to trade them. Coming a day before the Ninth Circuit reached a parallel conclusion, it leaves prediction markets without a financial-regulation route into two more jurisdictions.
The regulator found the operator failed to escalate a customer whose disclosed occupation was high risk and whose deposits reached about $189,395. NorthStar did not dispute the finding.
Regulated sports wagering in Ontario climbed 6% to CA$1.03bn in June, breaking the usual summer lull, as the expanded FIFA World Cup drove record activity even while operators' revenue slipped.
With this deal, Kambi will be powering sports betting in eight of Canada's ten provinces. The PROLINE expansion is one of the most significant supplier wins in North American sports betting this year.
A 240% surge in Ontario deposits could not save Rivalry from a leadership crisis that has left its co-founder as the company's sole remaining senior figure. The esports betting pioneer is now fighting for survival in a market its competitors are aggressively expanding into.
Ontario wants to open its poker and daily fantasy sports markets to players across borders. Four lottery corporations say that would break the law. Canada's Supreme Court will now decide who is right.
Parliament of Canada
Canada Gazette, Part II