More than 40 senators have written to Prime Minister Mark Carney to urge his federal government to ban all sports betting advertising in Canada.
The letter, sent by Sen. Marty Deacon and Sen. Percy Downe on Nov. 13, listed 40 other senators who support the proposal. The politicians called for Carney’s federal government to use the legislative and regulatory powers at its disposal to ban all advertising for sports betting websites and apps nationwide, labeling it a public health problem.
“We are asking for a ban on all advertising for sports gambling apps and websites,” stated the letter. “Such a measure would be similar to the advertising ban for cigarettes, and for the same reason: to address a public health problem.”
Senators already approved Bill S-211
The petition from the dozens of senators comes a few weeks after the Senate passed Bill S-211, the 2025 version of Deacon’s legislation that aims to establish a national framework of regulations for sports betting advertising.
Deacon’s 2024 effort, S-269, also passed the Senate in fall 2024 but was never taken up for discussion in the House of Commons amid a backlog of legislative issues and Justin Trudeau’s eventual resignation that prorogued Parliament. This year’s betting ads legislation had its first reading in the House on Nov. 5.
S-211 would seek to restrict the use of sports betting advertising by limiting its “number, scope or location.” Ideas floated have included implementing a whistle-to-whistle ban on ads during live sports broadcasts, prohibiting betting-sponsored intermission shows during games and preventing in-game promotions within betting apps themselves.
It would also seek to set out national standards for preventing and diagnosing problematic gambling addiction and supporting those affected.
At committee sessions in both 2024 and 2025, Deacon urged her fellow senators to pass the bill, citing regrets over the legalization of single-event sports betting in 2021. “We can see where this is headed, but we’re deciding to steer straight toward that iceberg anyway if we do nothing,” Deacon opined during a Senate session earlier this year.
Senators take question straight to PM
Deacon has spoken several times of having “sober second thought” about some of the effects of expanding sports wagering in Canada. She acknowledged in Parliament that she did not push for a full ban on sports betting ads in the Senate because she did not feel it was a realistic measure.
“While that is what I would love to see, I do appreciate there are Charter implications in that,” she said in October. “I believe that if I had sought a complete ban through this legislation, it would certainly have had a much rougher ride. As the saying goes, ‘don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.’
“If the government decides that a full ban is warranted after this bill becomes law, or even before, I would not be happier. But that will be for them to decide.”
Now, she and more than three-dozen other senators have taken the issue straight to the Prime Minister.
“A decision by Parliament helped create this problem, which means further action might minimize the damage that is already being done,” the senators wrote in last week’s letter. “We urge your government to correct this situation and ban all sports betting ads.”
Betting advertising declining, finds CGA research
One of the oft-cited complaints about sports betting in discussion of Deacon’s bills has been that senators feel that Canada has been “flooded” with sports betting adverts since 2021 and particularly since Ontario launched commercial regulated iGaming in April 2022. A Leger study published in September found that 59% of Canadians reported seeing sports betting adverts recently, and 75% of that cohort said that there are too many of them.
“Very real harm [is] being done today to vulnerable people of all ages exposed to a constant stream of advertisements promising a ‘premium gaming experience’ and urging them to turn their phone into a pocket-sized casino,” added the senators’ letter to Carney.
Not everyone agrees that it’s a problem that needs federal intervention, with some gaming industry leaders pointing to the fact that the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) places several restrictions on how licensed operators in the province can advertise, such as banning advertising of sign-up bonuses and marketing that would appeal primarily to minors, as well as limiting the use of celebrities to the promotion of responsible gambling.
“For over two decades, Canadians have had unrestricted access to unregulated online gaming and disregarding the existence of such activities or purporting that advertising is the cause of problem gambling would be unrealistic – and naïve,” wrote the Canadian Gaming Association (CGA) in a statement in September.
In the Senate last year, leaders of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the Responsible Gambling Council testified that Canadian broadcasters were taking measures to limit the quantity of sports betting ads on their channels. The CGA and thinkTV, which works with broadcasters to clear ads, presented research this year that shows that the number of adverts related to gambling content has fallen annually since an initial boom in 2022.
ThinkTV CEO Catherine MacLeod said at the Canadian Gaming Summit in June that the number of gambling ads that her organization sees every year “has gone down, down, down, down, down” and is a very small fraction of the total. The CGA wrote in September that online gambling ad spend fell 7% in 2023 and another 1% in 2024, and that iGaming made up 5% of total ad spend and 2% of total media ad spend in 2024.
