Federal inaction on iGaming is leaving Canadians stuck in an unsafe, unregulated grey zone

Ontario’s regulated iGaming market generated more than $4 billion in gross revenue in 2025, handled roughly $72 billion in wagers, and added 25 percent more active accounts year over year. Alberta is weeks from opening its own competitive market. Meanwhile, the federal government has said almost nothing about any of it.

That silence is starting to look less like restraint and more like abdication.

Provinces built the framework Ottawa wouldn’t touch

When Ontario launched its open-market iGaming system in April 2022, it did something the federal government had never attempted: created a licensed, competitive online gambling environment with built-in consumer protections. It regulated advertising, required responsible gambling disclosures, mandated self-exclusion programs, and set licensing standards that screened out bad actors.

The results are difficult to argue with. Ontario finished 2025 with 1.27 million registered active accounts — up nearly 25 percent on the year — and delivered over $800 million in provincial tax revenue. Players gained something they’d never had before from offshore platforms: recourse when something went wrong.

Alberta is following Ontario’s lead. Bill 48 has passed, a dual-agency oversight model is in place, and the province is set to open its private iGaming market on July 13, 2026 — with mandatory self-exclusion integrated from day one.

The provinces are governing. The question is why Ottawa feels it doesn’t need to.

A constitutional arrangement that’s showing its age

Canada’s gambling framework is a product of the Criminal Code — specifically, the carve-outs that allow provinces to authorize and regulate gambling within their borders. The federal government sets the outer limit of what’s legal; provinces decide everything inside it.

That arrangement made sense when gambling meant physical casinos and horse tracks. It fits the internet economy about as well as a fax machine fits a remote work policy.

As globalnews.ca reports on the best online casinos in Canada, legal operators now require valid licences from provincial regulators like the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario to serve Canadian players — a framework that simply doesn’t exist outside Ontario and, soon, Alberta. The result is a patchwork: strong consumer protections in one province, a state monopoly in another, and an effectively unregulated grey zone across the rest of the country.

Canadians in Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, or Manitoba who want to gamble online aren’t blocked from doing so. They’re simply doing it on platforms that operate outside Canadian jurisdiction — with no verified age checks, no consumer protections, and no tax revenue flowing back to their province.

The offshore problem no one wants to own

Offshore operators — licensed in Malta, Gibraltar, Curaçao, or under the Kahnawake Gaming Commission — have served Canadian players for decades, and legally so. Canadian law has never explicitly prohibited individuals from accessing foreign gambling sites. Enforcement has historically targeted operators, and offshore operators remain just out of reach.

Ontario’s regulated model created a meaningful incentive structure: licensed operators get access to a large, legitimate, advertised market; unlicensed ones get cut off from payment processing and marketing channels. Within Ontario’s borders, it works. Outside them, the incentive simply doesn’t exist.

A consistent national baseline — minimum licensing standards, shared age verification, and a clear regulatory signal to financial institutions — would give every province the tools to shift players toward regulated alternatives. Ottawa could accomplish that without touching provincial revenue authority or licensing jurisdiction. It hasn’t.

What federal engagement would actually look like

This is not an argument for nationalizing Canadian iGaming or overriding provincial jurisdiction on revenue. The provinces have built something that functions, and Troy Media has documented extensively how regulatory dysfunction at the federal level tends to suppress exactly the kind of private investment that creates stable long-term markets. The same dynamic applies here.

What federal leadership looks like, practically, is narrower: minimum national age-verification standards, cross-provincial self-exclusion database interoperability, and guidance to payment networks distinguishing licensed from unlicensed operators. None of those require the federal government to issue a single gambling licence.

The United Kingdom, Australia, and most of Western Europe manage federal-level frameworks alongside regional regulatory authority. The idea that ‘provinces handle it’ and ‘Ottawa does nothing’ are the only two options available to Canada is a fiction — and an increasingly expensive one given the scale of the unregulated market still operating in the grey.

Alberta changes the calculus

With Alberta’s market opening this summer, roughly half of Canada’s population will live in a province with a licensed, competitive iGaming environment. That critical mass shifts the political equation.

It becomes harder to argue that online gambling is too niche or too contested for federal attention when the country’s two largest provincial economies have both decided it’s worth regulating properly. At some point, continued federal inaction stops reading as principled deference and starts looking like a gap that somebody, eventually, will be forced to fill — probably in response to a consumer protection failure that a national standard would have prevented.

The market will keep growing regardless. The only open question is whether Ottawa intends to help shape it or simply inherit the consequences of not doing so.

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