Inside the Odds: How Canada’s Sports Betting Boom Is Reshaping the Playbook

04 November 2026

When Bill C-218 received royal assent in 2021, making single-event sports betting legal across Canada as of August of that year, it changed the long-term prospects for the Canadian gambling industry. The federal law allowed provinces to offer legal wagering on single sports events, including real-time betting during games. Canadians were finally able to take part in a market that was previously thought to be valued between $11 and $14 billion annually, with a large chunk of those bets made on black and grey markets.

With this significant piece of legislation, Canada disrupted the landscape for betting on games in the country. Ontario became the first province to launch a fully competitive online sports betting and iGaming market in 2022, licensing private operators like FanDuel, DraftKings and BetMGM through iGaming Ontario. Two years later, Alberta followed as the second province to develop a competitive online sports betting and casino market in July 2024, in line with provinces like Ontario that allow multiple private operators to run sports betting businesses in the market.

While other provinces have not followed a similar trajectory to Ontario and Alberta, experts and a retail casino executive told staff reporter Justin Cudmore in 2023 that his casino had “already seen boom in transfers of funds from [the black or grey market]”. “There is a significant market being shifted from remote bookies to regulated books and in return, those funds flow into government coffers.”

The potential revenues at stake with legal sports betting are substantial. Just a year earlier, Deloitte had projected that the financial gains for the Canadian sports betting industry could grow from about $500 million to nearly $28 billion in handle within five years of legalization under favorable conditions. Initial projections by policy experts also foresaw a potential annual sports betting handle above $25 billion, which, according to a 2022 study from the IU Press, would have generated upwards of $400 million in revenue for operators and governments combined.

Five years after legalizing sports betting, Ontario has consolidated its position as Canada’s dominant sports-betting hub. According to Canada's Ministry of Finance external affairs branch, Ontario's regulated iGaming market now commands more than 50% of all legal sports-betting handle in the country. Municipal affairs noted that Ontario’s online gambling market has become a multibillion-dollar industry in under three years. iGaming Ontario reports a staggering $82.7 billion in bets made on regulated internet gambling websites in Ontario's 2024–25 fiscal year, a nearly one-third increase from the prior year.

In a single month (September 2024) regulated Ontario sportsbooks recorded sports-betting cash wagers of about $1.074 billion, an 27% increase year-over-year tied to the start of the NFL season.

During one June World Cup period, Ontarians wagered $1.03 billion on sports, esports, proposition and novelty bets and exchange betting, up 35 percent from $768 million the previous June, while active player accounts rose 30 percent year-over-year to 1.32 million.

In its first two years, Ontario’s open market rapidly attracted dozens of licensed sportsbooks and casinos, with reporting from iGaming Ontario showing “billions in wagers” in each of the first four quarters after launch.

Ontario and Alberta are currently the only two provinces where dozens of private commercial operators can legally run sports-betting businesses alongside government-run platforms.

While hockey and live in-game wagering are considered important for market growth, especially in Ontario and Alberta, other provinces have been slower to embrace sports betting for a variety of reasons. Ontario has seen a surge in sports betting since legalization, with over 50% of the handle now taking place in Ontario. Alberta launched its open-market in 2024, while other provinces like British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have maintained tighter controls, primarily directing sports betting to government-run platforms like PlayNow rather than many private operators. The other provinces' approach contrasts with Ontario's model, which has attracted a flood of sign-ups since launch.

Legal reforms are also targeted at drawing bettors from unregulated offshore platforms into supervised, local or licensed platforms. This so-called “channelization” is driven by efforts by sports gambling regulators to encourage business from offshore websites to regulated betting systems within Canada, a line that gambling portals such as GambleGum.com also have to draw when they describe where Canadians can play.

In its 2021 research, Deloitte poses the rise of iGaming platforms as an attractive business opportunity: “With PAIs generating scale in regulated markets, drives growth of industry pressure to benefit from lower taxes and could speed up future for sport betting”, with gambling content increasing in sports media and sports betting apps that transform live games into causal, bettable "micro-events" similar to financial derivatives trading.

In the same way, the culture of fantasy sports has called fans' attention to tracking player performance and probabilities, blurring the line between fandom, data analysis and wagering that has propelled an online betting boom.

Despite the rise in popularity, many Canadian experts and public-health researchers have described the increase in problem-gambling associated with the rise of sports betting as "significant", including more people wagering to cover losses and borrowing to gamble. Problem gambling indicators in Ontario include the fact that the number of active online gambling player accounts tripled after the province opened its private market, and average monthly calls to the ConnexOntario problem-gambling helpline more than tripled immediately after launch and have remained elevated. Across Canada, public-opinion polling by the Angus Reid Institute found a strong majority of Canadians now worry that sports betting is becoming a serious problem.

These concerns have shaped regulatory activity since legalization, with calls for stricter restrictions on advertising and marketing of gambling services. And in some cases, prohibitive ones: in January 2026, the Canadian government announced a proposal to restrict advertising for single-sport betting to minimize harm to young people and discouraged gambling.

The Globe and Mail recently reported that for the next fiscal year, the province projects net revenue from gaming of $1.72 billion, which includes about $142.2 million attributed to the expanded sports betting market.

Five years after legalization, survey data show that while the overall population share of Canadians who gamble on sports at least monthly has grown from nearly 25% to more than 40%, according to a 2026 figure from The Globe and Mail.

The market seems poised for continued growth as more Canadian companies seek to expand. NetBet Sports, the France-based firm, has signed on with Alcohol Beverages and Gaming Commission of Ontario for a new sportsbook provision in the province, which is expected to launch in February 2027.