The 2025 version of a federal bill that would establish a national framework on sports betting advertising in Canada lies dormant in the Senate, for now. But the debate has heated up again this week amid the return of the NFL.
An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) published this week titled ‘Protecting Canada’s youth from the risks of exposure to gambling advertising’ asserted that sports betting ads “punctuate screened competitive sports games without limits on their duration or frequency.”
That, wrote CMAJ Medical Editor Dr. Shannon Charlebois and her co-author Dr. Shawn Kelly, “insidiously normalizes a harmful activity” and exposes minors to potential addiction.
The authors called for federal intervention to establish national regulation, and for the bill that would do just that, Bill S-211, to be expedited.
S-211 would require the development of a national framework placing more controls on the volume, dissemination and nature of gambling ads. It passed second reading in the Senate in June and is awaiting the kind of thorough committee discussion that its 2024 predecessor, Bill S-269, had last year before failing to reach discussion in the House amid wider political upheaval.
The Senator who has lent her name to both those bills, Sen. Marty Deacon, told the CBC’s ‘The Morning Edition’ this week that she is hoping S-211 will be taken up in committee in early October.
Blaming ads for problem gambling ‘naïve,’ says CGA
In a separate article about the CMAJ editorial, CBC gave room to Canadian Gaming Association (CGA) President and CEO Paul Burns to respond.
Burns stressed, as he has done many times before, that advertising is currently regulated. He cited the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario’s (AGCO) numerous advertising-related regulations, including restricting operators’ marketing of promotions and bonuses and prohibiting advertising that targets youth or uses athletes for anything other than responsible gambling messaging.
On Thursday, the CGA published its own written statement in which it stressed that any talk of further restricting advertising must be “informed by evidence-based research,” language Burns also used in a Senate committee last year, as well as in Canadian Gaming Business magazine.
“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,” stated the CGA on Sept. 11. “While the discourse surrounding gambling advertising in Canada has often been driven by emotion, the CGA maintains that a comprehensive discussion on gaming advertising is valuable, provided it is grounded in factual information and data.”
Betting adverts decreasing, data shows
The CGA also stressed that it is a combination of broadcasters, sports leagues and regulators and oversight bodies from both inside and outside the gaming industry that determine how and when sports betting adverts are seen, not the gambling operators themselves. One of the oversight bodies is thinkTV, a Canadian commercial television marketing and research association.
thinkTV CEO Catherine MacLeod has stated multiple times, including in Parliament last year and at this year’s Canadian Gaming Summit (CGS) in Toronto, that the number of adverts related to gambling content has tailed off since the initial boom after Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021 and Ontario opened its regulated iGaming market the following April. That was echoed in Senate committee discussion last year by Burns, Canadian Association of Broadcasters President Kevin Desjardins and then-Responsible Gambling Council CEO Shelley White.
“The number of gambling ads that we clear every year has gone down, down, down, down, down,” MacLeod said on a CGS panel. She noted that as of that time in mid-June, thinkTV had cleared 88 gambling ads in Canada through the first half of 2025. Her organization clears at least 35,000 TV adverts every year, she said. “We have to keep this in perspective.”
In this week’s statement, the CGA noted that “misinformation” has accompanied the new NFL and NHL seasons. “As summer turns to fall, we can set our watches by the return of ill-informed articles about sports betting advertising as soon as the first NFL game is broadcast,” the CGA wrote in a post on LinkedIn sharing its statement.
Despite the re-fired discussion, the CGA stressed that online gambling ad spend fell 7% in 2023 and another 1% in 2024, and iGaming made up 5% of total ad spend and 2% of total media ad spend in 2024. iGaming ads accounted for around 5% of all commercials during NHL and NBA game broadcasts in Canada last season, CGA research found.
