Canada: all our coverage

Alberta's window for grey-market operators to move into the regulated market closed on 13 October, and published counts of who made it range from 29 to 51. The regulator registers companies, the Crown corporation approves sites, and the two official lists do not match.

Entain's British online business grew 14% under the new 40% gaming duty, while customer-friendly football results and a Brazilian unit that shrank by more than a third before the ban held the group to 2%. Guidance survives with profit pinned to the bottom of the range, and the chief executive used the update to lobby the government before the Budget.

PointsBet Holdings says tighter compliance cost it turnover from its highest-value Australian customers, and AFL results went against it as it chased mass-market sports bettors. The six-month loss it now expects is many times the one it reported for the nine months before, and Alberta, the growth market it is counting on, is still not live.

Four provincial lottery corporations asked the Supreme Court of Canada on 7 October to overturn the ruling that would let Ontario's poker and fantasy players sit at the same tables as players abroad. The nine judges reserved judgment, and no date has been set for a decision.

Google will let certified online gambling advertisers buy the slot at the top of YouTube's homepage from 21 October, widening a carve-out that has covered only sports betting since 2022. The notice names no markets, and it arrives in a month when European lawmakers are moving to restrict gambling advertising rather than extend it.

GiG Software says PowerPlay is its fourth brand live in Alberta and the first to run its SportX sportsbook in the province. In May, PowerPlay said its 13 July launch date was "locked"; its arrival was reported on 1 October, and neither company has said what held it up.

Ontario's regulator has given theScore Bet the largest penalty it can impose for a single breach of its igaming standards, after a player accepted two cash-out offers on a CA$1,000 parlay and received neither. The ruling turns a cash-out figure on screen into something an operator must be able to pay.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who praised a Liberal plan to license every online gambling site in Quebec, will lead the province with 59 of 127 seats. His party's budget plan books CA$300 million a year from sports betting sites, but a campaign endorsement is not a bill.

The Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission has suspended the operator authorisation of Polar Ventures SDRL after a show cause process, and announced it a week later. The notice names no website, gives no reason and sets no end date.

Stake Canada Ltd. is now on the regulator's register and says it expects to be fully operational on 12 October, provided it signs an operating agreement with the Alberta iGaming Corporation. The date sits one day inside the 13 October limit for operators moving out of Alberta's grey market.

Century Mile and Century Downs go to Highfield Investment Group, a Calgary developer with a thoroughbred racing business, at 6.1 times last year's EBITDA. The rent Century stops paying is worth nearly half the price every year, which is why the deal matters more to its balance sheet than its proceeds suggest.

Online casino carried Ontario again in August, with revenue up 25.6% on a year earlier, while sports betting revenue fell 9.6% year on year and 30% month on month on a weaker hold. Active accounts dropped 11% in a month.

The geolocation supplier's count of sportsbook activity on 13 September ran ahead of Super Bowl LX, and new accounts more than quadrupled, in the same week that prediction-market apps out-downloaded every sportsbook. The two datasets are measuring different things, and the gap between them is the story of this season.

Ontario will defend its plan to pool poker and fantasy players with other jurisdictions against four Crown lottery corporations, which say it is Ontario conducting gaming outside Ontario. Alberta, Flutter, GGPoker's parent and the Canadian Gaming Association will be heard as interveners. Every other province's monopoly turns on the answer.

A University of Toronto and ICES study of 14 years of hospital records finds visits 154% above the expected level among males aged 10 to 29 and 116% above among men aged 30 to 44, with no change in females. The authors call it a caution for Alberta and every province considering private online operators.

An Instagram ad showed the Bayern Munich defender's father arrested over a vault of cash, cleared, and then urging viewers to play the same casino, with an AI Drake for good measure. The link went to a Comoros-licensed site two months after Alberta opened a regulated market that bans athletes from casino ads altogether.

The affiliate that made it said the man was not real, so he had no age. The ASA said his "casual and youthful presentation" was the point. On the same day it cleared White Hat Gaming's casino ads on an esports site because nothing showed its audience was more than 25% children.

Adjusted EBITDA of €162.5 million, a third guidance upgrade this year, and North American revenue up 161%. The driver is a motor-racing and slot hybrid running with Hard Rock Bet in Florida that settles on historical race results rather than a random number generator, and Playtech is telling investors not to annualise it.

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.

France's state-controlled horseracing monopoly PMU has signed a technology agreement with BetMakers to extend its pool and fixed-odds betting services internationally, a deal that arrives as BetMakers completes its AU$267m acquisition by Tabcorp and builds out a growing roster of global operator partnerships.