This summer Morinville-St. Albert MLA and Service Alberta Minister Dale Nally is meeting with casinos, racing entertainment centres and First Nations as the province advances its goal of allowing private companies to launch online gambling operations in Alberta.
Nally’s ministry is looking to Ontario for guidance as it develops an Alberta model, said Brandon Aboultaif, Nally’s press secretary. Ontario is the only Canadian province that permits privately owned gambling websites.
In April, Nally introduced Bill 16, an omnibus bill that set the stage for what it calls regulated online gaming by clarifying that Nally’s ministry, alongside Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC), is responsible for managing gaming in the province.
“We engaged with a lot of the online operators, and we heard from them loud and clear that they would not come to Alberta as long as AGLC is the regulator,” Nally told Paramount Commerce’s The iGaming Show podcast.
Because AGLC manages Play Alberta, the province’s only licensed online gambling platform, operators would have to share their data with a competitor, Nally said.
Nally told The iGaming Show he has met with regulators both within Canada and abroad as his ministry sets its sights on updating online gambling, also known as iGaming, in Alberta.
“I have to say our best partner has been Ontario,” he said. “They’ve been a good friend to us … They have been very agreeable to working with us, sharing their best practices, what went well, what didn’t go well, what we could do better.”
In June, Nally sparked excitement in the online gambling industry when he told an audience at the Canadian Gaming Summit that Alberta was setting down a similar path as Ontario.
“Ensuring the integrity of online gambling in the province is one of the key reasons we’re looking to expand Alberta’s markets,” Aboultaif told the Gazette in an email. “While Play Alberta has grown rapidly since its launch in October 2020, about 55 per cent of Alberta’s iGaming market is still estimated to be held by unregulated online gaming sites. These unregulated gaming providers are not subject to Alberta’s social responsibility policies, which are an important tool for promoting and supporting responsible gaming behaviours among Albertans who choose to gamble.”
Ontario’s online gambling model
Unlike Alberta, which has one, AGLC-run website for playing virtual VLTs, card games, roulette and more and for placing sports bets, Ontario has 50 regulated private operators and 80 gambling websites to choose from.
Since allowing private operators in 2022, Ontario’s online gambling industry has seen profits grow significantly.
Revenues from online gambling rose to $726 million in the first quarter of the 2024-25 fiscal year from $540 million in the same quarter last year, according to iGaming Ontario’s most recent market performance report.
“The big difference between what you’re seeing on your Play Alberta site and what you’ll see with the commercial gaming sites is there will be a lot more companies vying for the dollars, a lot more advertising for customers to go on to the sites to play,” said Dr. Nigel Turner, a gambling studies researcher with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Ontario.
“I think what’s been shown in the past two years is that advertising of gambling works … There has been a sharp increase in the number of people who have gone online to gamble.”
Online gambling takes money away from organized crime, particularly in the case of sports betting, and it repatriates money that is going to occasionally dubious overseas gambling operations, Turner said.
But it also makes individuals who struggle with problem gambling more vulnerable, simply because it lowers the barriers to access, Turner said.
An Ontario helpline started recording online gambling usage shortly after Canada legalized single-game sports betting. It saw cases of online gambling rise slowly until 2022, when the province opened its online gambling market to private operators.
“It skyrocketed after that, and now [online gambling] is the No. 1 reason people call the help line,” Turner said.
If Alberta’s wants to minimize problems with online gambling, it could coordinate self-exclusion, the practice of voluntarily banning oneself from a gambling venue, across its online gambling sites, something Ontario has not done, Turner said.
“Get the self-exclusion infrastructure in place beforehand,” he said. “There’s no excuse, as far as I’m concerned, for not doing that.”
