We told them this would happen.
In April 2021, a year before a single legal bet was placed on a privately operated gambling website in Ontario, the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation submitted our concerns to the province. We said that the new iGaming framework had to balance consumer demand with harm prevention, and that responsible gaming had to be built in from the get-go, not bolted on as an afterthought.
In August, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) published the evidence of what happens when a government ignores that advice.
The survey’s findings
CAMH’s survey on student drug use and health in Ontario is the longest-running school survey of teenagers in Canada. The 2025 edition drew on anonymous responses from 11,108 students in Grades 7 to 12 at 246 schools. It found that 12 per cent of students had gambled online in the past year, up from eight per cent in 2023 — a 50 per cent increase. One in five students had gambled in some form. It also found that online sports betting by students has risen tenfold since 2019 to 10 per cent.
All these students are below the province’s legal gambling age. As CAMH investigator Hayley Hamilton put it, despite age restrictions, “students are finding a way to gamble.” They are also in an age group under some of the greatest strain in modern society. The same survey found 46 per cent of students reported moderate-to-serious psychological distress.
The survey’s most damning number is not even about gambling, but advertising. More than 80 per cent of students said they had seen or heard an online gambling ad in the past month. Nearly a quarter saw one every day.
This is the market working as designed. Some 48 operators run 83 online casino and betting websites in Ontario — one of the most competitive regulated markets on the continent. Operators compete for attention, attention is purchased with advertising and advertising does not verify age. Why would it without a legal incentive?
Saturation, not targeting
Our First Nation fought hard to remove athletes and celebrities from gambling ads and, in 2024, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario acquiesced and passed a regulation to that effect. The commission acknowledged that children are heavily influenced by the figures they idolize.
But banning famous faces was never going to be enough when measured against the sheer volume of gambling ads. It is saturation, plain and simple. The CAMH has called for a ban on gambling promotion during sports broadcasts — when younger audiences are often watching most closely.
Clinicians are already seeing consequences. Psychotherapist Megha Vatsya at the CAMH’s outpatient clinic for problem gambling says she has been receiving referrals for adolescents as young as 15. The justification she hears most? “All my friends are doing it. I don’t want to miss out.”
The Canadian Medical Association Journal has documented ever-increasing calls regarding gambling to Ontario’s mental health and addictions helpline since the advent of private online sports betting. Boys and men account for a large majority of calls.
A generation shut out of work
Ontario’s youth face the weakest job market in years. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that unemployment among Ontario teenagers 15 to 19 years old rose to 22.2 per cent in 2025 from 14.9 per cent in 2019. The average time spent searching for jobs nearly doubled to 15 weeks.
The part-time job that once provided teenagers with a paycheque and a routine is harder than ever to land. Meanwhile, advertising that teens see every day tells them a wager on tonight’s Blue Jays baseball game might pay for their next night out.
No Ontario study has yet assessed the direct link between youth unemployment and underage gambling, but such evidence as we have points in one direction. American research on the financial consequences of legalized sports betting found that the harms — lower credit scores, more debt, more bankruptcies — fall hardest on young men in poorer regions. When doors to work close but swing open to betting, that exposure falls hardest on the youngest people with the most to lose.
The wider failure
The wider failure that has only partially been addressed is that Ontario handed responsibility for regulation to the very companies that profit from its opposite.
Traditional betting in casinos allows someone to register once with the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. (OLG) and be locked out of every gambling house in the province. That approach has been shown to help. It was built on the idea that individuals laid low by addiction should not have to repeatedly fumble through paperwork to protect themselves and their future.
It took the province four years to catch up online. For most of that time, someone trying to break a gambling habit had to quit every website — difficult for those whose addictive urges can reassert themselves at a moment’s notice.
Last May, iGaming Ontario finally launched BetGuard, a portal that lets adults opt out of all regulated online gambling websites at once. It is a much-needed step, but it is not complete. BetGuard does not cover traditional gambling, so a person must still register twice to be protected online and in casinos. Nor can it reach offshore sites illegally operating outside Ontario’s regulated market. And it does nothing for underage students who should not have access to betting in the first place.
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Increases in problem gambling as a result of market expansion may no longer be just an Ontario problem. Alberta opened its own regulated online market in July, and Carrie Shaw, a researcher with the Alberta Gambling Research Institute, has predicted the same disturbing trend is likely to play out there. Other provinces should learn from what went wrong in Ontario — and what may go wrong in Alberta — before they follow suit.
What a responsible operation looks like
Our First Nation knows very well what responsible gaming looks like. Our community has practised it for nearly three decades. The Great Blue Heron Casino, on Mississauga land on Scugog Island, opened in 1997, and has long been a significant employer in the region. We own the casino, which has been operated by Great Canadian Entertainment since 2016. Staff are trained to identify problem gambling and underage play. Income generated by a revenue-sharing agreement with the OLG supports our community’s housing, health care and water purification, and has funded millions of dollars in charitable contributions in the area.
From an economic perspective, gaming at brick-and-mortar casinos and resorts also creates local jobs, including the first-time jobs young people need to succeed. Online gaming does not do this. Success in the gambling industry cannot and should not be measured in mere profit. It’s important to consider the extent to which commitments are made to reduce the harms betting can cause and whether something is given back to the community.
What Ontario should do
The solution has not changed and the latest findings by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health make it even more urgent.
First, the province should redesign BetGuard so that banning oneself from wagering covers both traditional gambling sites and all licensed websites. iGaming Ontario’s own CEO has said extending BetGuard is “in the plan.” It is time to put a date on it.
Second, we need real-time human oversight rather than automated or AI-powered systems that flag nothing until the damage is done. These need to be backed by data-sharing across operators so that erratic betting patterns are addressed with intervention by people trained to do just that.
Third, we need to confront the extent of advertising with the whistle-to-whistle broadcast ban the CAMH has recommended.
Finally, the nature of online betting necessitates ironclad age verification. When one in eight students reports gambling online, it becomes clear that the existing checks are not working. Land-based operators have accumulated decades of expertise in player monitoring. Ontario should put that expertise to good use.
Five years ago, the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation warned the Ontario government that its gambling framework put vulnerable people at risk. It proceeded anyway. Perhaps the latest data will give pause. Children are already gambling. A self-exclusion approach designed to prevent adults from gambling doesn’t work for children who never should have started.
Any further delay increasingly exposes the province’s youth to the harmful effects of online betting. Ontario cannot afford to gamble with the future of its young people.
