THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Wednesday, June 5, 2024
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met with videoconference this day at 6:45 p.m. [ET] to consider Bill S-269, An Act respecting a national framework on advertising for sports betting.
Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chair: Good evening. I am Julie Miville-Dechêne, the deputy chair of this committee. I will now invite my colleagues to introduce themselves.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you, and welcome to our guests. Marty Deacon, a senator representing Ontario.
Senator Dasko: Donna Dasko, a senator from Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Clement: Bernadette Clement from Ontario.
[English]
Senator Cardozo: Andrew Cardozo, from Ontario.
Senator Cuzner: Rodger Cuzner, from Nova Scotia.
Senator Simons: I’m Paula Simons, from Alberta, and I come from Treaty 6 territory.
The Deputy Chair: This evening, we continue our study of Bill S-269, An Act respecting a national framework on advertising for sports betting.
For our first panel this evening, I am pleased to welcome Bruce Kidd, Member, Campaign to Ban Ads for Gambling, by videoconference; Jean-François Crépault, Senior Policy Analyst, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; Steve Joordens, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canadian Psychological Association, by videoconference; and Stewart Madon, Director, Professional Practice, Canadian Psychological Association.
[Translation]
Welcome and thank you for being with us.
[English]
We will start with opening remarks of five minutes from Mr. Kidd, followed by Mr. Crépault and Dr. Joordens. I believe you will be sharing five minutes. We will take questions after that. Mr. Kidd, you have the floor.
Bruce Kidd, Member, Campaign to Ban Advertising for Gambling: Thank you, senators.
The Campaign to Ban Ads for Gambling is a group of sports-loving Canadians deeply concerned about the harm created by ads for sports betting, especially among children and youth. We are Olympians, sports leaders, parents of athletes, researchers and teachers.
We call upon the Government of Canada to ban all ads for gambling in the same way and for the same health reasons that Canada already bans ads for tobacco and cannabis. We call upon Canada to adopt the public health approach to the problems of sports betting rather than the “blame the victim/ responsible gambling” approach currently taken by provinces and the gambling industry.
Our campaign enjoys broad support across Canada, from school boards and universities to health bodies, religious organizations, to MPs from all five parties and the public. A survey conducted by the Maru Group in February found that 75% of Canadians said that there’s a need to protect children and youth from sports betting ads, 66% said that those commercials should not be allowed during live broadcasts and 59% believe a nationwide ban on the ads should be implemented immediately. Those are overwhelming majorities on all questions.
We fully support the passage of Bill S-269, and we commend Senators Deacon and Cotter for introducing it.
When Parliament amended the Criminal Code in 2021 to approve sports betting, there was no debate about the consequences of advertising despite the well-documented research about the harmful effects and the public policy responses from other countries. This was a huge failure of public policy making.
Since legalization, there has been a virtual tsunami of ads for gambling during televised sports, on social media, in sports facilities and even cinemas. CBC’s Marketplace recently reported that 25% of the time for sports broadcasts is now devoted to gambling ads and commentators’ discussion of the betting possibilities. While the regulations prohibit ads directed at children, youth and vulnerable people, many of the ads target those populations explicitly.
Research shows that ads significantly increase the amount of gambling and exacerbate addiction and problem gambling. Statistics Canada estimates that 1.6% of adult gamblers in Canada — about 300,000 people — are at moderate to high risk of gambling disorders, including mental health issues. These can lead to bankruptcy, loss of income, loss of homes and even suicide. Problem gambling was classified as a non-substance-related addictive disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013. The Canadian Safety Council considers gambling addiction a community-safety and crime-prevention issue.
Although we do not yet know how many Canadian children and youth have been groomed into gambling, we hear from parents, grandparents, teachers and coaches all the time that those numbers are substantial. The Canadian Mental Health Association, Saskatchewan Division, has redirected its educational programs about the harms of sports betting from Grade 9 to Grade 1. In the U.S., the National Council on Problem Gambling reports that between 60% and 80% of high school students gambled for money last year, and 4% to 6% are considered addicted.
Another serious concern is the growing harassment of athletes whose performances do not meet the expectations of those who bet on them. This is a safe sport issue.
Of the considerable revenues enjoyed by the betting industry — some $588 million in Ontario alone last year or a total betting of $9.6 billion — very little is put into mental health services, education and research.
The federal government must assume responsibility for this situation that they’ve created. The most effective strategy of public health harm reduction is to ban the ads. Bill S-269 starts the necessary process to control gambling ads, which is why we support it and ask you to approve it and forward it to the House of Commons to turn it into law.
Thank you very much.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Kidd.
I will now give the floor to Mr. Jean-François Crépault. You also have five minutes.
Jean-François Crépault, Senior Policy Analyst, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health: Thank you very much and good evening.
[English]
It is a real privilege to be here.
I’m here on behalf of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, or CAMH, which is Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital and one of the world’s leading research centres in the field. We appreciate this opportunity to comment on Bill S-269.
The preamble of the bill identifies a problem — the proliferation and pervasiveness of advertising for sports betting and other forms of gambling. It correctly notes that increased exposure to advertising for gambling leads to increased participation in gambling activities, particularly by minors and those at heightened risk of harms from gambling. It goes on to call for measures to restrict the number, scope and location of sports betting ads in Canada.
We would like to submit to this committee that Canada needs a national framework on advertising for gambling in general, not just sports betting. We understand that it’s the recent proliferation of sports betting ads that has caused concern, and we share this concern. At the same time, from a public health perspective or an addiction perspective, there’s no reason to regulate ads for just this one kind of gambling.
The brief I submitted to the committee, which I hope you will have a chance to review, describes the prevalence of problem gambling, the nature of gambling-related harms and the risk factors for those harms. In the interests of time, I’ll skip ahead to the part about riskier forms of gambling.
A classic example of a more harmful form of gambling is electronic gambling machines, often referred to as slot machines. Slots are generally characterized by high speed of play, the possibility of large bets and features that encourage false cognitions. These features combine to facilitate rapid, immersive, continuous and impulsive gambling. As a result, many slot users have gambling problems, and it’s been estimated that more than a third of slots revenue comes from people experiencing gambling problems. For all these reasons, slot machines have often been called the most harmful form of gambling.
Another is online or digital gambling, which is gambling on an internet-enabled computer, phone or other device. Online gambling is more common among people who gamble frequently and, for some, this form of gambling can significantly contribute to gambling problems. In fact, gambling online may be the single strongest risk factor for developing a gambling disorder. Certain features of online environments may explain this, including easy access and ability to play for long periods uninterrupted, ability to gamble alone, use of credit card and other digital payments that make spending easy, and highly interactive or immersive features that facilitate losing track of time and/or money.
Now, the vast majority of sports betting takes place online, so the factors I’ve just listed are all relevant to sports betting, but they also apply to online casino games, including online slot machines, for instance.
There’s one form of sports betting that merits special attention, and that’s in-play betting, also known as proposition or prop betting. In-play betting involves placing a bet on a component of a sports event while that event is in progress. Examples include betting during a baseball game on whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike, or placing a new bet on the outcome of the game after it has begun, based on active and shifting lines or spreads. This betting format has only been legally available for a short time, so little is known about its uptake in Canada. In jurisdictions where legal sports betting has been available for longer, in-play betting is an increasingly popular form of gambling. As with slot machines, in-play betting facilitates rapid, immersive and impulsive gambling. Research has found that people engaging in in-play betting are three times more likely to have a gambling disorder than other people who bet on sports online, and their gambling problems are more severe.
Now, on advertising specifically, the purpose of advertising is to drive consumption, and gambling is no exception. The preamble of the bill is absolutely correct. There’s a causal relationship between exposure to gambling advertising and a more positive image of gambling, as well as intentions to gamble and actual gambling activity. Children and youth, as well as those already experiencing gambling problems, are especially susceptible to these effects.
Canadians are now more exposed to gambling ads than ever. The volume of gambling ads is often raised as a problem, but the content is concerning as well. Many of the sports betting ads appearing since 2022 seem designed to reach non-gamblers and encourage them to take up gambling, and some ads strongly imply that personal success can be achieved or enhanced by betting on sports. Ads for alcohol with such themes, for example, would be prohibited under the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s Code for broadcast advertising of alcoholic beverages, or CRTC code.
Of course, beyond advertising, the promotion of gambling takes other forms. Many Canadian media entities have established partnerships with sports betting companies, leading to gambling content being embedded in sports broadcasts and apps. All of this exposure to gambling promotion can be expected to cause harm. In fact, in Ontario, there’s already been a rapid increase in the number of people seeking help for problems with sports betting specifically.
In March 2024, CAMH released a Gambling Policy Framework, a document that makes evidence-informed recommendations for a public health approach to gambling. The written submission that you have in your hands, presumably, outlines our recommendations around advertising in full. I will not go through them right now in the interests of time.
In conclusion, advertising for sports betting should be addressed, and we’re encouraged by the introduction of Bill S-269. However, we urge the committee to consider broadening its focus to address advertising of all forms of gambling.
Thank you.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much.
[English]
We will hear from Dr. Steve Joordens. You have five minutes, sir.
Steve Joordens, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canadian Psychological Association: Thank you, chair and members of the committee, for inviting the Canadian Psychological Association to appear today. My name is Dr. Steve Joordens. I’m a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, where my primary research interests are in conscious and unconscious influences, memory and the effective use of technology for education.
It is an honour and a privilege to be testifying before you today on behalf of the Canadian Psychological Association, or CPA. Comprised of more than 7,000 members and affiliates, the CPA is Canada’s largest association for psychology and represents psychologists in public and private practice, private industry, academia, research, as well as students.
With respect to supporting mental health, Bishop Desmond Tutu said:
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
His analogy highlights the need to focus on prevention when addressing mental health, because treatment approaches are simply overwhelmed and we’d rather fewer people were struggling in the first place.
Marketing gambling amounts to pushing people who would otherwise be okay into Tutu’s river. It is the opposite of prevention. If we are going to allow gambling, we must ban any marketing of gambling, as we do other products like cigarettes and cannabis. Our society should not push anyone, especially our children, to engage in a potentially addictive behaviour.
The marketing we are seeing now represents one of the strongest pushes imaginable. Gambling companies are weaponizing psychology to convince anybody watching to just bet. They are normalizing and glorifying gambling in complete cooperation with sport and media companies in a way that has indeed convinced over 19 million Canadians to bet, a stunning penetration rate of over 65%.
Gambling is especially addictive because of the random nature of wins. When wins come randomly, as losses mount, the gambler becomes increasingly convinced that a win is just around the corner. We call this the gambler’s fallacy. Gambling houses just need you to bet enough to experience a win or two. Then you can become hooked, chasing wins as debts accumulate beyond your ability to pay. This is why gambling companies often offer up to $200 in free bets for first-time gamblers, more than enough for them to experience a few wins, more than enough to seed the addiction.
Estimates of problem gambling range from 2% to 5%, but note that these numbers are based on self-reporting and are, thus, underestimates, as most addicts deny any problem until they hit bottom. The recidivism rate is over 90%. Once addicted, it’s almost impossible to stop.
What’s more, it is estimated that each addicted person indirectly impacts five to ten others, typically family members. Marriages are ending, families are falling apart, and people with this addiction are committing suicide, many because they were pushed into a river they would not otherwise have come near.
Of course, any child old enough to be interested in either watching or playing sports is in the crosshairs of these marketing efforts. Children are the future gamblers, and now it is almost impossible to involve one’s children in sport without also indoctrinating them into gambling. Gambling ads are in our arenas, at our sports fields and even on players’ uniforms. It has become inescapable unless one avoids sport altogether.
When the marketing of a substance or activity is banned, it sends a strong and clear signal that substance or activity is potentially addictive and should only be engaged with in a knowing and cautious manner. Including gambling with cannabis and cigarettes provides a consistent approach to how Canada deals with potentially addictive substances and activities. It respects civil liberties and the right to choose while warning of the dangers. More critically, it stops the push.
In summary, allowing any form of marketing of gambling runs completely against our members’ attempts to prevent and address mental health issues for Canadians. It pushes all Canadians to consider betting, with an especially strong impact on our children and our marginalized communities. There is no need to market gambling. Would-be gamblers can easily find legal gambling on their phone apps, apps which can be policed. The Canadian government must not allow companies to push our population into addiction. With all due respect, I ask all of you to help us help Canadians. As a country, we can do better. We should and must ban the marketing of gambling.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening. I would be pleased to address any questions you may have.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Joordens. We will now proceed to questions from senators.
Senator Simons: The problem is that the biggest gambling addicts in this country are provincial governments. A year ago, the Government of Alberta lifted its long-standing cap on VLTs so that it could install VLTs at the Edmonton International Airport and the Calgary International Airport to help those airports combat their revenue losses post-COVID, and the goal was for the Edmonton airport alone to make $1 million a year on VLTs. The hypocrisy here is immense. At one point, when oil prices were lower, Alberta was actually making more money on gambling revenues than it was on oil and gas royalties. There’s not much motivation for provincial governments not to market; indeed, their own gaming commissions market lottery tickets. I made it a practice when I was a newspaper columnist to never write a piece about someone who won the lottery because, as far as I was concerned, that was just a free ad for lotteries.
How on earth would it be possible to do this without running up against the fact that for governments, especially the Government of Ontario, this is a hugely lucrative new source of voluntary taxation?
The Deputy Chair: Who are you asking this question to?
Senator Simons: I don’t know.
The Deputy Chair: Everybody. Who has an answer or the solution, the magic solution, or who wants to speak on this?
Mr. Joordens: I don’t know if I have a magic solution, but I want to point out that only looking at the revenue gain is just looking at half of a ledger of any business. The cost is what we are laying out, the cost in terms of mental health and the increased need for support and all that. There have been some projections in states in America where they have looked at the literal balance. How much is it costing us to allow the gambling? How much revenue is it making? If you care about mental health and if you’re trying to keep it at the same levels it was before you allowed it, the cost is more than the revenue. Only looking at the revenue is being very myopic, or it’s just being very cold to the mental health impact this is having.
I really share your frustrations. I applaud you for not publishing those things, and I understand, yes.
Senator Simons: Mr. Crépault, it seems to me that for a younger generation who have grown up on video games, the idea of in-game betting would be far more attractive because it’s more interactive and it’s more like they are playing the game. It occurs to me that we could make more people watch Senate proceedings if we allowed betting on whether Senator Dasko is going to ask a question of Senator Gold in QP. I joke, but this is the point. As fewer and fewer people watch televised sports, these games are being put in not just to increase gaming revenues but also to get younger audiences to watch games, because kids who have grown up in an interactive media world don’t want to just passively watch a game. They want to feel like they are somehow inside the game.
Can you speak a bit about why these in-game things are so addictive?
Mr. Crépault: Yes, for sure.
I can refer to our written submission on page 2 where we get into what can make particular forms of gambling especially addictive. One thing is speed of play. That’s the time between the gamble and the outcome.
Senator Simons: You don’t have to wait until the end of the game.
Mr. Crépault: Precisely. And another is event frequency, the time interval between bets.
I know there are some issues around buying a lottery ticket, but if you think about when a person buys the ticket, they have to wait for the numbers to be called. There are analogies to actual drugs or psychoactive substances. The quicker they hit the brain, the higher the addictive potential. I’m oversimplifying, but that is a concept that can be applied to gambling as well. In-play sports betting has it all. You’re getting constant reinforcements. You can sit there on your phone just doing it repetitively over and over.
The flip side of this that speed and ease of gambling are good policy levers and things you can address. In Australia, in-play sports betting is allowed but can only be done over the phone. You have to pick up the phone, call and place your bet, which is a fascinating way to address it. It’s a way of slowing it down. In the industry, they might refer to that as friction, and they might refer to it in a bad way because anything that slows you down from consuming their product is bad, but from a public health perspective, it’s a fascinating way to go about it.
There is room to debate whether in-play sports betting should be allowed at all. I’m just giving one example of a jurisdiction that has really kind of thought this through and tried to address the speed and the ease with which gambling can otherwise take place.
Mr. Kidd: I have a couple of quick things.
First, you are not helpless. There are some things you can do. You can start through the CRTC with the radio and television advertising, which for many people today is still extensive.
Second, the federal government could conduct education around this to argue for the harmfulness of this. I heard yesterday your questions and exchanges with Senator Cotter and others about the complications and the frustrations of federalism in Canada and how you can’t, in one fell swoop, make public policy changes that you might like. But you don’t have to throw up your hands in passivity. There are avenues through your very powerful government to begin to reduce this. One is through the CRTC, which still reaches a lot of people, and second, through education. If the Canadian mental health associations were supported in their educational efforts, schools and so on, I think that would make a big difference.
Third, you could consider — as J. P. has said — finding a way to ban prop ads. Senator Keenan in Massachusetts has just introduced a proposal in that state to ban prop bets because of the harm they create.
Senator Quinn: Thank you for being here tonight, and thank you for your commentary. It underscores the issue rather nicely, I think. I have four questions.
First, I didn’t hear anybody speak to this, but would my impression be correct that many of these gambling addictions occur in that part of the population who can ill afford to be gambling in the first place? Is that a fair statement? I ask that of all of you because you all have different angles.
Mr. Joordens: We know from the statistics that the middle class is also gambling heavily, but, yes, the problem gambling tends to be predominantly amongst people with lower economic status and marginalized communities. That’s where it is especially strong, but gambling is a literally across socio-economic status.
Senator Quinn: Any others? That sums it up.
I will move to my second question. Last night, I was asking questions about clause 6 with respect the CRTC and how they need to be involved with assessing the adequacy and effectiveness in reducing the incidence of harms resulting from the proliferation of advertising for sports betting. My concern is that we have asked the CRTC to do a lot of things. In clause 3, we talk about the horizontal work that needs to take place amongst several ministers, including the Minister of Health. We talked about the Minister of Heritage having to file a report in five years on all of this.
Does it make sense that we ask the CRTC to assess the effectiveness of the legislation with respect to mental health issues or the reduction in that? Shouldn’t that be something that’s more done on a collaborative, horizontal basis? My fear is that the CRTC is very busy. I’m not an expert on the CRTC, but I’ve learned a lot through Bill C-11 and Bill C-16, and they seem to be a busy crew.
The Deputy Chair: Do you have a question?
Senator Quinn: I will come to it. Mr. Kidd, I am concerned that we will be asking the CRTC to do something that they don’t have the skill sets and competencies to do. It may get lost in the shuffle, and we won’t get the results that the government is trying to achieve in the reporting procedures. I will start by asking Mr. Kidd and then Dr. Joordens and anyone else in the room.
Mr. Kidd: Thank you, senator.
As we read the international research, the people who have looked at this for years have concluded that banning the ads is an effective way to reduce harm. Banning ads through broadcasting is one way of doing that. As I understand it, there are seven states in Europe now who have fully banned ads for sports betting and other forms of gambling, and there are other restrictions. Many of those restrictions are implemented through the national broadcaster. That’s point number one.
Second, I understand — and you are even more expert on this — that the Department of Canadian Heritage is leading a whole-of-government approach to this because they fully get that it is not just about broadcasting, but it touches on health, sports and other developments. Hopefully, the positive support for this legislation will accelerate a broadly based whole-government approach to harm reduction in this clearly problematic area.
Senator Quinn: I agree with you with respect to the first part of your answer in that the regulator, the CRTC, is best positioned to bring in regulations to regulate advertising, but I am concerned about assessing their adequacy and effectiveness. When I see those words, I think of the health issues that have been clearly laid out by other witnesses, and I am worried it may get lost in the shuffle.
Mr. Kidd: You have another witness coming later today from the U.K. who can tell you about the research conducted there. We’re not researchers —
Senator Quinn: Thank you. I will move on, if I may, because my chair is very strict with time.
Dr. Joordens, can I ask your view on that?
Mr. Joordens: I don’t understand Canadian politics to the extent that you guys do, but I do want to highlight the distinction between making gambling available, so the revenue and all that kind of stuff, versus not pushing it. This relates to the previous question too. I think of the old Steppenwolf song, “The Pusher.” If you haven’t heard it in a while, go back and listen to it, because that’s the critical distinction here. All levels of Canadian government should agree that we don’t want to be pushing addiction on our children and grandchildren. I believe that would be a point of general agreement. The research is very clear about the impact that has on mental health. We don’t need to do further assessment. That is my perspective.
Senator Quinn: I will jump to my last question. It is very brief. It is for the witnesses who are in the room. You mentioned that the bill should be expanded to all advertising. Are there other things in this bill that you think should be added or places that we should be more thorough? I am a supporter of this, but how can we make it more complete other than that which you just mentioned? Is there any other place?
Mr. Crépault: I don’t have a great answer to that. In looking at the bill, my focus was on encouraging the broadening of it. The bill I am imagining might be a different bill. I mean that with no disrespect. Just changing the wording from “sports betting” to “all forms of gambling,” there could potentially be something there. I have no better answer than that.
Senator Quinn: Thank you.
Senator Cardozo: My question is for all the witnesses. You are all talking about completely banning the advertising of sports betting, but this bill isn’t doing that. It is talking about restricting it. Although, the way section 2(a) reads — and Senator Deacon might want to correct me — is that it could ban it. It is saying, “ … with a view to restricting the use of advertising, limiting the number …,” and then it goes on to say, “ … limiting or banning the participation of celebrities …” but not banning the advertising.
Is it your view that this bill is doing something that’s useful? From what I hear, you don’t think restricting it is good enough. You are talking about a complete ban on advertising. I will ask Mr. Crépault to speak first.
Mr. Crépault: Sure. I had great conversations with Dr. Joordens and Dr. Kidd about this. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has made recommendations not to ban gambling but to regulate it. That’s not necessarily that we disagree entirely with the idea of banning gambling, but it’s a matter of tactics. We took the view that it was unlikely in the short-term that the Ontario government, to whom we were addressing many of our recommendations, would actually want to ban gambling altogether. We made recommendations on specific ways to regulate it, for example, by applying specific parts of the CRTC code for alcohol to gambling. It is the kind of thing where that might be more palatable to governments. Our recommendation was that the federal government should ideally bring forward — I think when we were developing this report, Bill S-269 had not yet been tabled. What I am trying to say is that we are not opposed to banning gambling ads, but we felt it was important to make recommendations on how it could be regulated. In that sense, I think Bill S-269 is a great start.
Mr. Joordens: Any regulation would be far better than what we are seeing how. I have seen the CAMH report, and there are a lot of good ideas in that.
However, I would also say that if we are talking about extremes, one would be making gambling illegal and the other would be completely deregulating it. For me, banning the marketing is the appropriate and reasonable middle ground. I would extend it to all forms of gambling, and potentially even alcohol, and say that if it is an addictive activity, the Canadian government will not push it. Maybe that goes beyond the current bill, but with respect to supporting the mental health of Canadians, that seems to be the appropriate and reasonable place to be.
Senator Cardozo: Mr. Kidd, your group is called the Campaign to Ban Advertising for Gambling so it seems like you would be more than restricting it.
Mr. Kidd: Yes, we are in favour of a full ban, but we also support the legal, constitutional and tactical considerations that that you and others have to make. We will push hard, but we understand that you, as senators and federal civil servants in the CRTC and other ministries, are going to have to steer, navigate and negotiate through all of the pitfalls. In the best possible world, as seven European countries have done, a full ban would be the most effective strategy for harm reduction.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Dr. Kidd. We will now hear questions from Senator Deacon, who is the sponsor of this bill.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you very much. I will see what I can squeeze in today I appreciate it.
One comment off the top that might help us is in response to Senator Cardozo and what you said about information, if the government wants to impose a full ban, I and so many others would love that. We just didn’t think the bill would survive a constitutional challenge if we saw a full ban, and didn’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. I am totally open to that piece.
Mr. Crépault, you were talking about your report, which we have received, but I would like for the record for you to highlight the recommendations in your report so we have it in the record.
Mr. Crépault: I would be happy to do that.
Our recommendations on advertising specifically: First, the federal government should develop and implement national rules governing the advertising and promotion of gambling, either through legislation like with cannabis and tobacco, or with regulations like alcohol. These rules should, at a minimum, include the following principles: Sponsorship by celebrities, influencers sports figure, et cetera, for gambling should be fully prohibited, which includes the promotion of responsible gambling.
There should be a whistle-to-whistle gambling promotion ban for sporting event broadcasts where gambling content of any kind would not be allowed from five minutes before a match begins until five minutes after it ends.
Youth protections would be strengthened. Gambling advertising should be judged on whether it appeals strongly to youths, regardless of appeals to adults — this is to counter some of the specific language in Ontario’s regulations. Gambling advertising should not appear in media and venues where minors can be expected to account for more than 25% of the audience.
Finally, the following standards barred from the CRTC code should be applied — again, those for alcohol — should be applied to gambling advertising. These are in the CRTC code, but we have adapted them for gambling. Commercial messages for gambling should not attempt to influence non-gamblers of any age to gamble; imply directly or indirectly that social acceptance, social status, personal success or business or athletic achievement can be acquired, enhanced or reinforced through gambling; imply directly or indirectly that gambling is essential to the enjoyment of an activity or an event; and refer to the feeling or effect caused by gambling.
I will mention that all the recommendations preceding the CRTC-inspired ones are all things that are implemented in other jurisdictions in other countries. Thank you.
Senator M. Deacon: I appreciate having that in the record.
Dr. Kidd, thank you for being here. Your reputation precedes you. You have spoken to Canadians, school boards, universities and other organizations. Betting with these private companies is only legal in Ontario, and thus these ads, should only be, as we know, seen in Ontario.
I’m wondering, from the Canadians you’ve heard from, are they limited to Ontarians, or have you spoken to other individuals or groups from other parts of the country and what their thoughts are about this?
Mr. Kidd: We’ve spoken to Canadians, leaders of religious organizations, school boards and mental health associations from other parts of the country, who see children, youth, vulnerable people and adults betting as a result of the ads that they see on signals coming out of Toronto and Ontario. I understand they are also able to place bets, whether it is legal or not, with companies that only do business in Ontario.
I can’t tell you any more details about that, but as we reach out or respond to open-line call shows in other parts of the country, it is clear that the concerns that we have here in Toronto where I live are shared in many parts of the country.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you for your work with the Toronto District School Board.
I have a question for CAMH and CPA. When it comes to gambling on sports, is there any kind of different interpretation on the prediction of the outcome of the event for sports. I watch these games. Segments give you betting odds and chances of something happening. They talk about individual players and give predictions. Is there any illusion of control when betting on sports, or is it about the same as what you talked about earlier, Dr. Joordens, with respect to slot machines or roulette tables?
Mr. Joordens: Thank you, Senator Deacon, and thank you for pushing this bill.
Certainly, there is the impression people have of expertise. They watch a lot of sports, they have seen a lot of things, they have a feeling that they know more about certain athletes or teams than others do and that they can leverage this expertise as an enhanced winning rate. It has been shown not to be true across the board, but it is certainly empowering and making them feel this illusion of control that you are alluding to.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: Colleagues, we’ve received Mr. Crépault’s brief. As all documents must be bilingual, it will be translated and distributed to all members of the committee.
[English]
Senator Cuzner: Thank you very much. Thank you, Senator Deacon, for bringing this bill forward.
Thinking back, we did some research back in 2015 on participation rates in sport between 2000 and 2015. Year over year, it is an increase of probably 2.5%, 3.5% or 4%, typically. We did it because there was a tax deduction for registering your child for sport beginning in 2008. There was no discernible increase in sports participation in the wake of that, yet it took how many millions of dollars out of coffers. That was the rationale for it.
The one year that we did see a fairly significant spike in sport was in 2003 because, in 2002, Salt Lake City hosted the Olympics and we had women’s hockey. Canada was successful in the women’s hockey, and all of a sudden there was Jennifer Botterill and Hayley Wickenheiser and young girls in Canada had role models. They saw themselves in those sports now, and so there was a significant spike subsequently.
We’ve seen it in basketball with the Raptors coming to Canada. We had about two players in the NBA at the time, and we have close to 35 players in the NBA right now.
Role models matter. It’s very unsettling seeing some of the best in their particular disciplines selling themselves out for gambling.
Dr. Joordens, I really appreciated your analogy regarding this legislation with what transpired with cannabis. I supported the legislation that Brian Masse brought forward in the House, because they said it would bring sunlight to it; get it away from bookies, sharks and what have you — make it legal. They would generate revenue and all those aspects. No anticipation nor discussion has been mentioned here around the advertising.
With cannabis, you wanted to get it out of the hands of the Hell’s Angels, and now you buy cannabis from a bureaucrat rather than a gangster or thug. Revenues are coming into governments that they are addicted to, but there is no advertising.
I know there’s data around the cannabis piece that tells us that things are going pretty well, and it was pretty good legislation going forward.
Dr. Kidd, you have referenced some international studies and research. Are we getting the data that we need around the impacts now in Canada? Who is gathering the data?
You can be sure the casinos and those agencies that are running the betting have the data. Are there references? Does it suffice? Does there have to be more?
I would like your comments on the data around the issue since the increase.
Mr. Kidd: If that’s for me, the data we have is mostly international, because they have been collecting and analyzing the incidents of all of these factors for a long time. We look to the U.K., Europe and Australia where this has been a concern for much longer.
Since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized sports betting, we have looked to the United States, because they are two or three years ahead of us in collecting the data. Canadians are attempting to collect and analyze this data as soon as they can, and that’s moving ahead.
In some provinces like Ontario, with legalization came a significant cut to the funds supporting research as well as treatments. That has been very discouraging.
Yes, we need more careful pan-Canadian research on the take-up of sports betting under our current regimes and the harms to support agencies like CAMH, which is doing such an excellent job.
Mr. Joordens: To jump in, as a scientist, you can never have too much data, so we would love to see more data. At the same time, when it comes to the question of whether we should ban the marketing, the question in my mind is always this: Why would we not? The concern seems to be something about illegal sites. It is like what you were alluding to with the Hell’s Angels versus the bureaucrats.
But the thing with gambling is that you use apps to gamble. Apps are taken from app stores, which we can police. The Hell’s Angels cannot put their app on the app store if we don’t want them to, so the whole notion of needing to somehow have some sort of marketing to preserve the revenue flowing in the right direction, we don’t need data to do that. With the way it works, we can police it. We can make sure the revenues go where they should. Data is great, but keep in mind that we sometimes get lost in data when the logic is clearer than the data.
Senator Dasko: The question I wanted to ask has been partially answered, but I want to dig a little deeper into the regulatory options that were laid out, especially by you, Mr. Crépault.
From last night’s discussion with Senator Cotter and Senator Deacon, we learned that betting and advertising against betting are not seen as the same category as, let’s say, a health risk or issue like tobacco. We were told last evening that the type of framework where all marketing is banned would probably not be able to go forward. Anyway, that was the argument they made, so let’s just put that on the table for a moment.
You did mention other options in terms of regulation. I wanted to pursue that more in terms of what you think might be the best.
If we accept the premise that we can’t actually stop all betting, which is what I think all of you has said — we should stop all marketing and advertising. If we don’t do that — if we fall short of that — then we look at other regulatory frameworks and other ways to regulate advertising.
For example, can we effectively ban advertising to children? Can we actually do that? Is there a way to do that, given the technology we have, given the access that children have online and so on — can we actually do that? Is it effective?
The other methods that you mentioned with respect to using the alcohol model — I’d like you to explain that a little bit more. What actually does that involve?
Anyway, those are my questions.
The Deputy Chair: That was also my question: How can you separate the children from the adults? Can you really target the children and ban advertising to them? How would you do that?
Senator Dasko: How do you do it effectively? Does it work? How do we do it? Often, we do focus on children. There is a bill now that, if it goes forward, will ban advertising of bad foods to children. That is outside of Quebec; there’s already a law in Quebec.
The Deputy Chair: Let’s hear from our witnesses. There is little time left.
Mr. Crépault: Shall I start? Thank you so much for the question.
First of all, in terms of this idea that you can’t treat gambling like you would do for alcohol, tobacco or cannabis, I would absolutely challenge that. You can and should. As I think Dr. Joordensens described them, they are potentially addictive substances and activities. They are clinically very similar, and in public policy, they can be treated in a very similar way, as well.
To me, the Cannabis Act really is the gold standard there. We were actually an organization that came out really early on a public health approach to cannabis being all about legalizing and strictly regulating it. If I could wave my magic wand or go back in time, I wish that maybe not so much had been left to the provinces, because some provinces are doing better than others. Regardless, the point is that, under the Cannabis Act, promotions of any kind for cannabis are only allowed at the point of sale, which is inside a store, which is, by definition, 18 or 19 plus, depending upon the province or territory.
What’s challenging about that with sports betting in particular is — and again, this is a topic that Dr. Joordens and I have had great conversations about — what is that for a product or a service, essentially, that is entirely virtual? For cannabis, we felt very comfortable that, yes, you want to make sure that you give the legal market a fighting chance. People will be seeing stores in the neighbourhood — everything they need. If they are of age, they can go in. That isn’t to say there aren’t violations of this. Social media is still a wild west. Obviously, there are illegal cannabis actors and so on.
Speaking as someone who’s been involved in cannabis policy for much longer than gambling policy, it is something that Canada really did right. We talk about that as an example of even — it’s hard to imagine a world in which we would sell alcohol in plain packaging and so on, but if we were to actually start from the premise that alcohol also causes lots of harm, we want to address this with a public health approach, then yes, we would probably be looking — the World Health Organization has three what they call “best buys,” the three policies that are a combination of most effective and easiest to implement, provided there’s political will, and those have to do with the price — this is for alcohol in particular, but it also applies to cannabis and, I would argue, gambling. Price actually maybe not. But for alcohol, it’s price, availability and then also promotion, crucially.
Again, the concept of availability is difficult for gambling, for something that’s virtual. But the World Health Organization would tell you we should be completely banning all advertising of alcohol. That template, if you will, that policy template exists.
Senator Dasko: [Technical difficulties] Can you talk about that?
Mr. Crépault: Maybe I’ll let Doctors Joordens and Kidd.
Mr. Joordens: It is very tricky for exactly the reasons — we sit and watch sports with our children. So if the ads are going to be there, then the children are going to be exposed from the moment they are interested in ads. That’s one of the reasons why we favour the total ban. That is the effective way to keep children safe. And not just children. When you think of recidivism rates of 90%, that’s like putting an open beer in front of an alcoholic. That’s what we’re doing with people who are trying to recover from gambling right now. They are continually being pushed back into it.
As far as good ideas of how to somehow prevent children from seeing this while — my question is: Why does anybody need to see it? Those people who are adults who wish to gamble know where to find it. So let’s just not push it on people. Let’s let those looking find it and children should not be looking. That would be my best solution.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much. Senator Clement, you have a very short question to finish this round.
Senator Clement: Thank you for your work. Are children more or less amenable to treatment around gambling, do you know?
Mr. Joordens: Treatment around gambling is very difficult, and Jean-François can speak to this as well. Again, with 90% recidivism rate, it’s hard when you get addicted to that. You want to chase those wins. But certainly children would be more amenable to being indoctrinated, this notion of normalizing gambling and glorifying it, when that starts at a young age. Especially if a parent in the household or an older brother or sister is gambling, that observational learning power is very strong. So children will very quickly think this is normal, this is cool, this is what people do, and so that barrier for them trying will be very, very low. Let’s make sure they don’t get in the river. Let’s not think about pulling them out once they are in.
Senator Clement: Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Those testimonies were very interesting, I have to say. It’s very worrisome in many ways. That brings the end to our panel. Thank you very much for your generosity and your thoughts. Will colleagues please join me in thanking our witnesses for joining us and taking the time to share their expertise and experience with us today?
[Translation]
Thank you very much. Esteemed colleagues, we are resuming our study of Bill S-269.
[English]
For our second panel this evening, we are pleased to welcome Raffaello Rossi, Lecturer and Assistant Professor in Marketing at the University of Bristol Business School, by video conference; and Will Hill, Executive Director of the Canadian Lottery Coalition.
[Translation]
We also have Mr. Martin Sampson, Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, as an individual, by video conference.
My apologies, you aren’t appearing by video conference at all. Welcome and thank you for being here with us.
[English]
We will first hear opening remarks of five minutes each from Dr. Rossi, followed by Will Hill and Martin Sampson, followed by question and answer. So please, Dr. Rossi, you have the floor.
Raffaello Rossi, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing, University of Bristol, Business School, as an individual: Thank you so much for the invitation. My name is Dr. Raffaello Rossi, and I’m a lecturer in marketing at the University of Bristol here in the U.K. Today, I want to share some of the insights of our research on how gambling advertising has exploded in the U.K., how it disproportionately affects children and how other jurisdictions have reacted.
In the U.K., gambling and its marketing have vastly been deregulated since 2007, and now, 17 years later, consumers are bombarded with gambling advertising on TV, social media, radio, public transport and, of course, whilst watching sports.
Our recent study focused on the prevalence of gambling marketing during the opening weekend of the English Premier League. We identified a total of 11,000 gambling messages via live broadcasts, radio and on social media during a single weekend, making them almost inescapable. The most prolific single match included almost 3,000 gambling messages.
In a different study in 2021, we focused on Twitter and found around 1 million gambling ads posted from U.K. Twitter accounts within a single year. Half of 11- to 17-year-olds report seeing gambling ads at least once per week on their social media feed.
In response to excessive gambling marketing, various European countries have recently almost entirely banned marketing. That included Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Poland and, as of last week, Ukraine. However, it is the same multinational corporations, such as Bet365, Betway or FanDuel, that contributed to the introduction of those bans in these countries that are moving now into new jurisdictions that have more recently opened up, such as Canada or the U.S., initiating a similar cycle of high volume and aggressive marketing, leading to normalization, increased participation and eventually to higher rates of gambling harms.
Earlier this year, we replicated our study on the prevalence of gambling advertising in Ontario in collaboration with CBC Marketplace. We looked at the live broadcasts of seven NHL and NBA games and found a total of 3,537 gambling messages, which equals around three gambling messages per minute. This is, of course, highly problematic as it is normalizing gambling as a normal part of sports consumption but may also have detrimental effects on viewers experiencing gambling harms or indeed children who make up around 10% of the viewership.
This brings me to my second point, highlighting my worries with online gambling advertising and their effects on youth. In our study focusing on Ontario, we already found various similarities in terms of the volume and the content of social media gambling ads compared to the U.K. Over five days, we recorded almost 600 social media ads posted by nine betting accounts in Ontario, viewed by over 5.6 million people, most likely mainly by young people.
In 2021, we conducted an online experiment with 650 participants aged 11 to 78, and what we found was that gambling advertisements are strongly appealing to children and young persons aged 11 to 24, but not to adults. Indeed, for every category we looked at, including sports betting, online casino, but also different forms of advertising, we found the same patterns: gambling ads trigger significantly more positive emotions in children and young people compared to adults. One reason might be that children don’t yet have the necessary knowledge and experience of how harmful and addictive gambling can be.
This issue is amplified by sneaky online advertising techniques deployed by the industry, especially something called content marketing. Content marketing avoids any reference to the brand, product or service being advertised and simply aims to trigger positive emotions and to be shared online. I have included four examples in the written remarks that I think have been circulated to the committee. Whilst these ads seem funny, innocent and harmless, they are still advertising a highly addictive product, and our most recent research actually found that children and young persons are not able to identify that these content marketing ads are actually advertising, leaving them unprotected. This is concerning, as around 50% of all social media ads we found in Canada and in the U.K. are actually content marketing.
In conclusion, I hope the committee will take into consideration the long-term consequences of allowing this aggressive and sophisticated marketing to continue. I’m looking forward to any questions. Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much for all this research.
Will Hill, Executive Director, Canadian Lottery Coalition: Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight about gambling and its advertising. I’m pleased to speak to you on behalf of the Canadian Lottery Coalition. Its five members include the British Columbia Lottery Corporation, Lotteries and Gaming Saskatchewan, Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries, Loto-Québec and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation.
These provincial lottery corporations have been designed to deliver responsible, social gaming entertainment and return 100% of their annual net revenue to their provincial governments. These funds most typically go to support priorities like health care, education, First Nations and a whole host of valuable community programs and services. They do much more than just support the public purse. They also contribute to the public good in many ways, employing thousands of Canadians, paying out hundreds of millions in sales commissions to lottery retailers and winning international awards and certifications for the development and delivery of industry-leading responsible gambling programs.
Our members have been vested, by the Canadian Criminal Code and through provincial gaming legislation, with the sole legal authority to operate certain gaming activities within their home provinces, including for the purposes of this committee online gaming and digital sports betting. Yet, the members of our coalition, and by extension the citizens of their respective provinces, are forced to contend daily with hundreds of illegal online gambling operators, their unregulated websites and misleading advertising. These websites are indisputably contrary to the Canadian Criminal Code. They are not authorized to operate pursuant to any of the exceptions laid out in the code’s section 207, and yet they are quite plainly targeting Canadians.
For the specific purposes of this committee’s work, they are marketing and advertising to Canadians quite aggressively and quite successfully. A study commissioned by our coalition by a leading global gaming intelligence firm found that in one recent year, nearly $2 billion in gross gaming revenue was siphoned away from this country by illegal online gaming operators. It also noted that the compound annual growth rate of the Canadian illegal online gaming market was pinned at 15% over a recent five-year period.
Now, I should note that there is a group of private online gaming operators that have, in fact, been authorized to operate legally within Ontario — and Ontario only — by its provincial gaming regulatory, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario. However, most of these same operators advertise to and solicit Canadians outside Ontario where they have no legal authority to do so. It appears that major media companies are selling national advertising bundles when regional blocking efforts could be in place. The AGCO to date has declined to sanction these gaming operators for their activities outside of the province.
The group that I have come to represent, the Canadian Lottery Coalition, joined together in the last two years, motivated primarily by a desire for a safer online gambling landscape for Canadians. They want to help find solutions for problems created by illegal online gambling in Canada that include recurring annual tax revenue losses, increased threats of player harm and potentially even financial crime. You see, illegal operators aren’t accountable to offer gambling in a socially responsible manner or implement typical responsible gambling features, like effective age-of-majority controls, and in the absence of any financial data reporting to regulators or oversight bodies like FINTRAC, the risks of fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and the misdirection of funds are all significantly increased.
By contrast, each of the members of our coalition gives players a website they can trust. They adhere to all federal and provincial laws, meet stringent standards for technical integrity and offer robust player health safeguards, with supports and resources available to help players. They also, importantly, abide by provincial regulation around advertising designed to ensure that their marketing efforts promote healthy, positive player behaviours. They must not encourage people to play beyond their means, must not present gambling as an alternative to employment, must not market to minors and must not imply that skill and experience can ensure a positive outcome.
Our suggestion to the committee is that any regulatory framework that results from this bill going forward should carefully consider and delineate between what is legal and what’s not. After all, if a particular operator is not legally enabled to take wagers in a certain province, why should they be allowed to advertise there? In certain instances, they are advertising in different provinces to support illicit operations. I would specifically draw your attention to the fact that many advertise .NET or “free play” sites that only serve to redirect Canadians to international affiliates through deception. Our coalition would like to see this loophole closed.
We also hope to avoid the unintended consequences of creating a framework and guidelines that illegal operators could simply ignore. This would only further exacerbate the unfair playing field between regulated and unregulated sites, reducing the opportunity to enhance safety for all Canadians.
I thank you for your care and attention.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: Thank you, Mr. Hill. We will now move on to Mr. Martin Sampson.
[English]
Martin Sampson, Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, as an individual: Distinguished members of the committee, it is an honour to be here this evening. I appreciate the opportunity to participate in our democratic process and offer my perspective on this issue.
The prevalence and pervasiveness of gambling advertising during sports broadcasts is deeply troubling and should cause all citizens to be concerned because of the serious risk that it poses to our society, but particularly to our youth. The current situation is untenable, and we need swift action from policy-makers.
It’s very important to note that I am not here as an expert on the issue, nor representing any organization. I’m here as an individual, a concerned citizen and a father of two teenage boys who are immersed in the world of hockey as players, volunteers and fans.
I support this legislation, which I think is an important step toward protecting young people who are at particular risk of exploitation and harm from this type of advertising, particularly in the digital age. The bill’s provisions for stricter regulations can help ensure a safer environment for our youth who often navigate these spaces with less awareness of the potential dangers.
Let me tell you how I came to this issue.
In our household, hockey is not just a thing; it is the thing. Nine months a year, maybe more, I am at a rink five or six days a week. I have an extensive network of friends that have been brought into my life because of my sons’ involvement in minor hockey, and I am extremely grateful for that. I will come back to that network in a moment. Despite my deep involvement in local hockey, I had become disconnected from the National Hockey League, or NHL, partly because of the saturation of the sport in my daily life and partly because the Senators — the other Senators — have not been contenders for a Stanley Cup in some time. Anyway, I hadn’t been paying attention to the NHL for a little while.
At about this time last year, I had half an ear on my sons, ages 14 and 16, who were watching an NHL game in the other room. That evening, I heard a gambling ad during the broadcast. I didn’t think much of it until I heard another one 30 seconds later. That grabbed my attention, so I sat down and started to pay closer attention. Within minutes, there was another ad featuring NHL superstars Connor McDavid and Wayne Gretzky. I have to tell you that this disgusted me. I found this really distasteful. Then I noticed that the analysts were including sports betting storylines into their commentary and that the on-ice product was also completely saturated with gambling ads.
This was all new, and it really caught me off guard. I was horrified to be witnessing the carpet bombing of my sons’ minds with sophisticated sports betting advertising that had been fully integrated into the broadcast and clearly designed to convince them to place a bet and believe themselves to be cool for doing so. I asked myself, “Am I witnessing the toxic seeds of a gambling addiction being sown into the impressionable minds of my teenage sons?” The situation felt absurd. What I was witnessing was so obviously and clearly wrong. I thought, “How did we get here? No thinking person can believe this makes sense.”
As a result, I published an open letter to the NHL, Sportsnet, CBC, Rogers, NHL players and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC. I didn’t hear a word from them, but I received enormous response from my network. I will tell you, in my network, everybody — to a person — is as horrified as I am. These are parents of children of varying ages, and they are quite angry about this.
The barrage of gambling advertisements during a family-friendly sports broadcast starkly illustrates a glaring issue in our current approach. As much as these companies are exercising their right to market a legal service, the method and extent to which we are allowing such advertising appears to be drastically misaligned with basic societal values we cherish in Canada and, certainly, the ones we strive to instill in our youth.
Let me be clear: Gambling is legal, and adults should be able to gamble responsibly and do whatever they want, but equally clear is that the approach that we have adopted since 2021 is obviously, self-evidently wrong. You don’t need to be an expert to see that. We have to correct it.
The urgency for this legislation, in my opinion, cannot be overstated. It seeks to establish a much-needed framework to limit the scope and presence of gambling ads, especially during programming accessible to minors. It calls for a national standard that not only regulates these advertisements but also emphasizes the prevalence of gambling-related harms. I think it is a step in the right direction. I think it will facilitate critical discussions and actions aimed at shielding our youth. I think it will help with the development of preventive measures. If I had a criticism of the legislation, it is that it does not go far enough and does not move fast enough.
I urge this committee and everyone involved to consider the voices of parents. We must protect our children from being the targets of aggressive marketing strategies by gambling companies who are motivated only by profit. This bill represents a significant step toward safeguarding the mental and emotional well-being of our young people. As a father, and in alignment with the many parents that I talk to, I implore you to act swiftly and decisively. We owe it to our kids to ensure that their sports viewing experiences are safe, enjoyable and free from undue commercial influences that could lead them down the path of addiction.
I thank you again for allowing me to speak on this crucial issue. I am eager to see the positive changes promised by Bill S-269, and I’m hopeful for the healthier sporting environment it promises to cultivate for future generations.
As a last thought, I would like to thank Senator Deacon, Senator Cotter and people like Dr. Bruce Kidd, Jeremy Luke and all the other witnesses who have appeared today. I would like to thank the public servants and the officials present today in the committee and beyond. Your roles are increasingly challenging during these complex times. We need your wisdom, your commitment and your leadership now more than ever as we navigate the pressing issues facing our society. Thank you for your continued service and the sacrifices you make in the pursuit of a better, safer and more equitable Canada for all of us.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much for this heartfelt testimony, and thank you to all our witnesses.
Mr. Rossi, I am interested to know what Great Britain is doing with those harms. You are in Bristol, so you must know what is happening. I think they have acted to prevent children from gambling, but what about the advertisements? Can you tell us a bit about that?
Mr. Rossi: Thank you so much for the question.
To be honest, we are not doing enough by far in the U.K. I think it is quite interesting. The U.K., alongside Australia, has been at the forefront of opening up the market, deregulating marketing, legalizing sports betting, advertising and so on. Over the last 10 or 15 years, there was a lot of debate on how we can make it safer and how we can reduce it. There was a big consultation on it, but the steps that have been taken in the U.K. are not effective, by any measure. They are not enough. There is ongoing and increasing frustration among the public, researchers and policy makers in the government’s response to it. Yes, we have a kind of new way of protecting children by saying that they must not be of strong appeal to children, but that are not working at all. From my understanding, this is not an effective measure, by any means.
The Deputy Chair: It is a measure that a regulatory body imposes on advertisers, and it is to not aim it at children, but it doesn’t work?
Mr. Rossi: Exactly. Basically, what they say is that they have established a so-called appeal test, a kind of guideline in different categories. If you do that, then this is likely to appeal strongly to children, or less strongly, or there is a lower risk, higher risk and so on. The fundamental flaw in that whole policy paper and this way of regulating is that they have never consulted any children. It was adults who said, “Oh, we think that cartoons are appealing to children,” but, actually, in our research with 210 children, we found that cartoons are not really appealing to them. They don’t like them. It’s other stuff. It’s insider driven sentiment. All of you have children. You know that they have their own sense of humour and are super sophisticated in doing that. If we want to do something to protect children, we need to include them in the policy making and also when we rule on potential breaches.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you.
Senator Simons: I will follow up with Professor Rossi. First of all, thank you for being here in the middle of the night.
The Deputy Chair: Yes, thank you.
Senator Simons: You mentioned that other European countries, however, had banned advertising. I know that the European approach to regulating commercial speech is quite different than it is in North America. Could you tell me, were they just banning it on conventional broadcasts? How would they be attempting to ban online advertising and social media advertising such as advertising on X or Facebook or other platforms like that?
Mr. Rossi: Thank you very much.
For those countries I’ve been mentioning — for example, Belgium — they have almost entirely banned any form of gambling marketing, similarly in Italy or Spain. It is not just broadcasting. It is any kind of gambling marketing, with very few minor exceptions.
The way they have done it, it is part of licensing conditions. If a licensed gambling operator is found to have done any advertising somewhere, whether it is online or whatever, they just lose their licence, and they are not legally allowed to operate.
Senator Simons: Ah. This is very clever. This is much better than trying to regulate YouTube or X or podcast advertising. If you are a gambling organization, and you advertise — I think we are done now. Why hasn’t that same model been adopted in Great Britain?
Mr. Rossi: I really don’t know. We have a very strong betting lobby, and we have a very Conservative government that has not prioritized this properly. I don’t know. We are all increasingly frustrated, because we are the outliers. We have the most evidence, but we are just not acting upon it.
Talking about these countries, it is so fascinating that once you start looking into them, you see the similarities all over again. With the black market argument we’ve just been hearing about from one of the witnesses, it is the same thing in Germany. It is the same thing in the Netherlands. There are the same issues. The Netherlands, interestingly, said, “Well, I think the way to deal with the black market problem is that we need to open up all of gambling marketing.” Because then people would learn what the legal betting brands are. They did that in 2021. Two years later, they introduced an almost entire ban on gambling marketing because it just exploded within two years, so it didn’t work.
Senator Simons: I am sorry to sound so gobsmacked here. I am a former journalist and very sensitive around issues of regulating speech, but you have just flipped the equation. If you regulate the legal gambling organizations and tell them they can’t advertise as a condition of their licence to operate in your jurisdiction, then that potentially solves a lot of problems. It would not make Mr. Hill happy.
The Deputy Chair: Is that the solution?
Mr. Hill: What I would strongly suggest is that in any instances where there is a widespread ban on marketing, you oftentimes see a migration to the black market. Operators that lose their legal licence will do what is called phoenixing. They will step away from branding and marketing with one particular brand and resurrect their operations using the same player platform but different brands altogether. Hence, the phoenixing. They rise from the ashes, sometimes in a matter of days, sometimes in a matter of weeks, and they continue their ways of reaching customers with unregulated gaming websites.
Senator Simons: I suppose the challenge would be in our instance here that if Ontario is regulating the gambling, the federal government would have no jurisdiction to control any advertising.
Thank you, Mr. Hill and Mr. Rossi. You’ve given us a lot to think about. Thank you, Mr. Sampson, for your passion. I appreciate that, too.
The Deputy Chair: Mr. Hill, you were forceful in denouncing illegal ads and illegal gambling, but I am, to be frank, more interested in legal operations, because that’s what we have some handle on. It is pretty difficult to regulate illegal stuff.
What are you doing? Are you advertising gambling on Loto‑Québec or other sites? If so, we just heard from Britain that they haven’t been able to protect children. What are you doing to protect children? Do you have studies that show it works? How much percentage do you have of advertising? Do you have really strict laws about that?
Mr. Hill: Absolutely. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The Canadian gaming landscape is grounded in federal legislation. The Canadian Criminal Code allows for provinces, or a series of provinces working jointly together, to conduct and manage lottery schemes. That’s legalese for commercial gambling activities.
Typically, these provincial lottery corporations are stood up under provincial legislation that is aimed at several things: increased returns to the public coffers, job creation, economic stimulus, but above all, acting in the best interests of the people of that particular province, maintaining the highest levels of responsible gambling.
Toward that end, many of our members have received the highest certification from a global organization called the World Lottery Association. It’s based overseas in Italy.
The Deputy Chair: Specifically on our topic, gambling?
Mr. Hill: Yes.
The Deputy Chair: What kind of advertising are you doing?
Mr. Hill: Our members engage in television, radio, digital and out-of-home billboards, but do so oftentimes under the direction of provincial regulation that ensures that they are not marketing to minors or that they are positioning gaming as a cure-all or even as a major benefit. They are very particular —
The Deputy Chair: Advertising, by definition, tries to attract people.
Mr. Hill: That’s right.
The Deputy Chair: So how can it be advertising and not attract customers?
Mr. Hill: Well, the thrust of advertising in these particular jurisdictions is toward that segment of the population that is legally enabled to wager, the adult population. We absolutely scurrilously avoid even the perception that we are marketing to minors.
The Deputy Chair: Okay. I’m intrigued to know how you are doing that. We should probably see some advertisements. For me, it is difficult. I don’t know how you cut it, because advertising, by definition, attracts people to gamble. That’s what we’re talking about.
Senator Dasko: How do you not market to children? For example, we heard from Mr. Sampson about the hockey games. The family is watching a hockey game. That’s kids and parents, so then the kids are being marketed to. You don’t want to exclude these kinds of performances.
Mr. Hill: What we suggest is that this is matter of both content and placement. When I say “content,” the spirit of the advertising is geared toward an adult population. There are not elements there that appeal to minors. That is very deliberate. When I talk about placement, this is working with agencies to ensure that media buys by provincial lottery corporations don’t land within programming that’s popular with children. For instance, that oftentimes involves programming that’s later at night, outside of prime time.
One of the things that I would absolutely suggest is that you could hold up the efforts of the members of my coalition and their advertising versus those of private operators and illegal operators that have moved into Canada largely over the last two years but have been advertising here and creating a problem for close to two decades.
The Deputy Chair: Dr. Rossi, do you have anything to add to that? Is it possible?
Mr. Rossi: I have a question to Will Hill, and that is whether he has ever talked to children. You were quite determined in saying, “Our ads do not appeal to children,” but it’s really hard, as an adult, to say that or to judge that. Have you actually engaged with young people and said, “Look at that. Is that something you would like?”
Mr. Hill: Specifically, if you are asking me personally, no, I haven’t spoken to children. In my 15‑plus years in commercial gambling in Canada, 11 of which were spent at Ontario Lottery and Gaming, the Ontario operator, I was never directly involved in marketing capacities. I worked in support of a board chair for several years and was a right-hand man to a CEO and eventually worked on strategic partnerships with different commercial entities where we could find complementary relationships in the marketplace. So, no, I am not a specific expert. As much as I have a deep understanding of the gambling industry, I don’t have a specific expertise in marketing. To your question, I have to confess that no, I have not spoken to children, myself.
Senator Cardozo: I have a question for Mr. Hill on the advertising. I can’t vouch for this for sure, but it seems to me that I’ve seen lottery ads at hockey rinks and other venues forever. I may be dreaming this, but I have the sense that I’ve seen “funding from” or “supported by” from various lottery corporations in various sporting locations. They are not saying, “come and buy lottery,” but they are saying, “supported by.” Would that be right?
Mr. Hill: That goes back to the genesis of provincial lottery corporations. Many of them were set up to assist the public good, and the revenue from lotteries was returned to community projects.
I have a dear friend who at one time served as the CEO of OLG, and his employment was prompted by seeing some of those placards that you are mentioning: “This community was built with proceeds from Ontario lotteries.” It is what persuaded him to pursue employment at OLG. He wanted to be part of a company that actually gave back to the community in that way and supported the building of community infrastructure.
Senator Cardozo: I can understand why it is done. You want to tell people where the money came from. You want to be open and up front. I just say that there is some level of promotion there.
I want you to educate me on the people you’ve called the “illegal gambling operations” who have come into Canada recently, as opposed to your members, including the ones in Ontario, the national lotteries, whatever. What is the difference between them?
Mr. Hill: The illegal market in Canada is substantial, and it’s actually been fairly long-lasting. I mentioned this is a two-decade-old problem. And it’s not unique to Canada: Illegal online gambling is taking place in multiple jurisdictions around the world, as I’m sure Dr. Rossi will tell you.
Senator Cardozo: It is global, too.
Mr. Hill: Absolutely. There are some operators who hail from far away jurisdictions like Antigua, Barbuda, Curaçao, Malta, et cetera. They use the pervasive nature of the internet to get to customers in other jurisdictions where there may not be legal clarity over whether they are permitted to do so.
Here in Canada, we are actually fairly specific. The Criminal Code of Canada lays out prohibitions on all forms of gambling, but it carves out certain very narrowly defined exceptions. The most notable of those exceptions is where and when a province or a series of provinces jointly and together conduct and manage a lottery scheme. What that essentially means is that in each of the jurisdictions that our coalition operates within, the only safe, secure and legal online gaming platform is the one run by the provincial lottery corporation. And yet, senator, on a day-to-day basis, they are dealing with competitors that number in the hundreds that are certainly far less scrupulous and not as focused on responsible gambling as our members are. We are designed in a certain way to benefit the public purse but also the public good. Our focus is on returning as much as we can to the provinces that we serve as opposed to serving the interests, perhaps, of a small group of investors or shareholders.
Senator Cardozo: So your members are Crown corporations, owned by the provinces?
Mr. Hill: That’s correct.
Senator Cardozo: Regarding these others who come in, is there any form of regulation, or can anybody come into the Canadian market to have a gambling operation? To add to that, what is the role of casinos? Where they fit into this?
Mr. Hill: Casinos fall under the same law, section 207. In certain instances, such as in Quebec, Lotto Quebec operates a series of casinos and gaming halls itself. In other provinces, for instance, British Columbia, the provincial Crown lottery corporation oversees a portfolio of private service providers that follow contractual obligations closely and carefully to ensure the government remains the operating mind behind the gaming activity, even if it is being executed on their behalf by others commercially.
In terms of online gaming, there are any number of companies that have been able to penetrate different marketplaces here. Often, in the case of Lotto Quebec, when they went to stand up their digital gaming platform, there were already entrenched operators that had been operating illegally in the province that had essentially snapped up most of the customers, so Lotto Quebec had to go from zero to 10 to 20. They now command a slim majority of the marketplace in Quebec. They are still contending with significant illegal competition in that province.
The Deputy Chair: We will now hear questions from Senator Marty Deacon, who is the sponsor of this bill.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you to our guests for being here with the different hours. I have three questions for three guests. I will go as quick as I can.
My first question is to Mr. Sampson. Thank you for your very impassioned statement. I would like to touch upon what, in your perspective, this combination of sports and gambling could mean in the long run. It is pretty new for us, as you said with your experience in your home, having broadcast ads and promotions for betting companies thrown at us while watching and even participating in the games we love, the values we believe in and the possibility of sport. Personalities, athletes and sports networks are telling us to place a bet, how to play, with whom and when for all Canadians, but particularly for our young people. What do you think this will mean in the long term, and how do you feel about that in your role as being people who are inspiring others to be outdoors in a parks and recreation setting from coast to coast to coast?
Mr. Sampson: I don’t see any good outcome. It is a terrible situation that we’ve created. In 20 years, we will be looking at the data and wondering why so many people are struggling with a gambling addiction. I don’t think it is good. The pervasiveness of it, the way it is being presented and the way it is being integrated into the broadcasts are, on the surface, wrong and bad. I watched my children consuming this, and I thought that this is so obviously not right. It was just over and over and over again. And it continues. You watch an NHL broadcast now, and it continues.
Another element that really concerns me is that one of my sons is a tier 1 hockey player. He was just drafted to the CCHL, so he might have a path forward in hockey. I’m not suggesting he is going to the NHL, but if he goes to NCAA, will there be pressures on him to participate in gambling?
The saturation with this is deeply troubling. I don’t see this going anywhere good. I really think it’s problematic that NHL superstars are lending their names to this. I find that disgusting, and surely that’s a loophole we can close. If we just reduce things, I think it would put us in a better situation, but as I said before, my preference would be no gambling advertising during sports broadcasts.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you for that.
Maybe just carrying on with that and keeping that in mind, Professor Rossi, thank you for your data and for joining Canada with Marketplace and pulling together data we can use as Canadians, that sample from the fall with the NHL and NBA piece. For senators, the chart I talked about yesterday talks about what all these things are in Germany, the Netherlands and other countries as they do more aggressive bans.
When you were on The Current on CBC, there was a quote that really stood out for me. It came out at me today. You said:
We compared children to adults and to younger persons, and what we found throughout all different forms of gambling advertising, was that children had much more positive emotions and responses to those gambling ads compared to adults. I mean, indeed, adults even hated these on average.
Is the takeaway that these ads, according to the industry, are not designed to appeal to children, or in the end, are they only appealing to children? How can we stop that?
Mr. Rossi: Thank you for the question, senator. It is a brilliant question.
First, yes, that’s exactly what I said and that’s what the findings show. With 210 children 11 to 17, 220 young people 18 to 24, and 220 adults over the age of 25, through various kinds of categories, we found the same thing, measuring basically the emotions people responded with when they see gambling ads on social media.
The interesting thing is that it depends especially upon the form of advertising. I mentioned content marketing, and I don’t know if you had a chance to look at that in the reports, but that’s something that’s triggering such strong positive emotions. When we replicated the study recently, face to face, children started laughing when seeing those gambling ads. It was horrendous. Adults weren’t. For them, it was a tiny bit positive but much more negative than for children. If you look at conventional advertising, which is the “get a $10 offer” or the biggest betting brand, then it is the way children and young people have positive emotions, but adults have strong negative emotions. They hated it. It was very fascinating. Different things were coming together. It had to do with advertising literacy. It was, “How good am I to understand this advertising? They want to sell me something.” It has to do with experience in life.
But of course, we must not forget that people under 25 are just more vulnerable. There are different things happening in their brains, making them more impulsive and more emotive. They just respond more strongly to that.
When we replicated the study, we measured the body responses also, and it was the same thing again. They react strongly positively to these things, which suggests to me that social media gambling advertising is essentially inadvertently targeted to children. That’s why I was interested in Mr. Hill’s opinion on whether they actually talked to children. I don’t think the industry is doing it on purpose. I don’t think so. It might just be by accident, but it is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you.
Mr. Hill, I will be as quick as I possibly can. We are talking about individual Canadians right now, but I’m trying to also do something else to assist provinces. It is unfair that they have not gone the Ontario route that we see perhaps across Canada, but their populations of other provinces are seeing the ads. They are seeing them across the country, with the downsides coming with it. British Columbia 27%, Atlanta 42% — we have a variety of information. Networks like Rogers and CBC have said that as long as the ads say, “Ontario only,” they can carry on doing their job and can legally broadcast across the country. What further steps are before us to take in any kind of framework that could keep these ads in Ontario?
Mr. Hill: That would be a matter for broadcasters and internet service providers to ensure that these operators are staying entirely and solely to the jurisdiction where they are legally and able to take wagers.
What I can say is that their advertising that is going beyond Ontario is contributing to one of the greatest problems as it relates to illegal online gambling in Canada, and that’s player confusion. When a player in a different province than Ontario sees one of these ads on Hockey Night in Canada during one of the intermissions and then goes to log on their computer, and on their sports news website of choice there’s a digital banner with an operator, they actually develop the perception that it must be legal. If I’ve seen it on TV and I see it there on my computer while I’m sitting here in Manitoba, Saskatchewan or elsewhere, if it’s coming to me, then there must be some legitimacy to it. There’s a sheen of legality and authenticity implied by advertising that goes beyond Ontario.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Are you saying that broadcasters are accepting illegal advertisements?
Mr. Hill: I’m suggesting that it appears that operators are purchasing national advertising bundles but tagging all of their ads by dint of regulation in Ontario with “Eligible in Ontario only” or “Must be present in Ontario only.” There’s typically a tag — often, if you’re thinking of a 30-second television spot, in about the last three to five seconds of the ad, that has fine print at the bottom that indicates there that the ad is intended for an Ontario audience only, but it is absolutely hitting a national crowd.
Senator Simons: Mr. Hill, before I joined the Senate, I was a newspaper columnist in Edmonton. Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis is not part of your coalition, but I distinctly remember a time when they started advertising lotteries specifically to teenagers because they were worried that young people were not buying lottery tickets. They designed their lottery ads specifically to appeal to 18 to 24-year-olds. When I said to them, “Doesn’t an ad that appeals to an 18-year-old also appeal to a 16‑ or 17-year-old,” they said, “Well, the trouble is that youth aren’t buying lottery tickets, so we need to market to youth. Otherwise we’re going to lose our market share.” This story has always stayed with me.
I can’t help but wonder to what extent your concern is also that you are losing market share because young people are not buying static lottery tickets when they can do the more interactive in-play betting that gives them more adrenaline jolts per second than buying a ticket and waiting a month to see what happens.
Mr. Hill: Thank you for your question.
Let me answer by outlining a global phenomenon, which is to say that if there’s a smouldering platform in the gambling industry broadly, it’s that young players — and by young players I’m referring to between the ages of 20 and 35 — don’t seem to be inclined to buy lottery tickets or play slot machines or table games with the same frequency and enthusiasm as their parents and grandparents did before them. What you are seeing broadly across the industry are efforts to pivot more to entertainment. You’re actually seeing this in the corporate name tags of some of these different companies.
Senator Simons: Yes, it’s interactive; it’s not passive.
Mr. Hill: It involves dining and live entertainment. It is diversifying the options.
Sports have often been seen as a means to attract new, young customers because you’re meeting people in their 20s and their 30s at two key junctures: one, on their phones where they spend most of their time; and two, in the sporting arena where they have great interest in the local team. While it is not an especially lucrative or profitable line of gaming, sports betting is attractive in terms of customer acquisition.
The business of customer attraction deals with the issue that I described earlier of not having customers come in with the same enthusiasm as perhaps in decades gone by.
Senator Simons: But here we have it. I can say this in the Senate because this is our demographic. Old people buy lottery tickets; young people don’t buy lottery tickets. Young people are far less interested in televised sports than their parents, so this is the perfect marriage of a way to increase revenues for gambling and a way to interest increase interest in watching sports. I joked earlier that if we had in-game betting in the Senate Chamber, more people would tune in to see our speeches.
It seems to me that if you’re trying to attract a youth market, it’s hard to create advertising that appeals to 19- and 20-year-olds that doesn’t perforce also appeal to 16- and 17-year-olds.
Mr. Hill: I understand entirely where you’re coming from. I’ve been fairly specific that this is more about attracting an audience that’s 20 and older. The age group of 20 to 35 is the segment that is largely being targeted in various advertisements.
Senator Simons: They have more money than 16-year-olds.
Senator Cardozo: I want to come back to understanding who it is we are dealing with here. Part of the bill is dealing with regulating what will be on television and radio, but there’s the other part of it, advertising online, and that’s not regulated by anybody and presumably can’t be. Who are the companies, the people or individuals who are running the sports gambling operations? They are not your folks. Who are they? They are local and international companies, right?
Mr. Hill: Yes, that is correct.
What I would suggest to you is that there are currently 47 registered operators in the Province of Ontario outside of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, or OLG, the provincial Crown agency. They are operating close to 80 different online gaming brands within that province. It’s estimated that slightly more than half are maintaining operations in wagering in the other provinces in this country. You have a selection of operators from Ontario that, while legally able to operate solely in that province, are conducting business elsewhere in this country.
Beyond that, you have what’s called an “overlay of the puralegals.” These are companies that, as I mentioned earlier, hail from faraway destinations, sometimes in the Caribbean, Eastern Europe or the Mediterranean, and eschew licensing and regulation almost anywhere and everywhere. By dint of the internet, they can penetrate homes and phones and attract new customers. They would not be present in Ontario, but I can assure you, senator, that they do have a presence here in Canada.
Senator Cardozo: These 47 are not regulated?
Mr. Hill: They absolutely are regulated. They operate under commercial contract with an agency called iGaming Ontario, and under regulation from the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, or AGCO, which has laid out what’s called the Registrar’s Standards for Internet Gaming that deal with things like responsible gambling, technical integrity, but also marketing and advertising. That is included within the standards-based regulation conducted by the AGCO that they must abide by. This is where you have advertisements that are mandated to include “in Ontario only” or “must be physically present in Ontario” as a tag to any 30-second television spot.
Senator Cardozo: You said 47 companies in Ontario. Are there different companies in other provinces, or do these folks operate in other provinces?
Mr. Hill: My understanding is that often there will be a separate corporate entity operating in the other nine Canadian provinces and three territories, but the branding and marketing identity will be virtually identical. Often the distinction is insertbrandnamehere.ca versus insertbrandnamehere.com or .net, as has been a past practice for many years.
Senator Cardozo: And all these companies are regulated by a provincial or territorial authority across the country?
Mr. Hill: No. In all other provinces outside of Ontario, the only legal and regulated website is the one run by the provincial lottery corporation. All others are sitting outside of the Canadian Criminal Code and outside of regulation.
Mr. Rossi: I think that it is really important for me to mention something here about online marketing. If you want to extend the market and have some younger players, you can change the product or you change the marketing you’re doing. I think what we’ve been seeing globally is a massively increasing trend by the gambling industry to actually invest in online efforts. In the U.K., this is now more than half of it. More than half of the industry’s marketing budget, which is insanely big in the U.K., is going into online.
The big problem with online advertising is — and I think it’s really important — firstly, that it is highly targeted. If I see something, that doesn’t mean any of you would see it. As a researcher and regulator, how will you ever be able to police it? The second big thing is that it is non-permanent. It disappears. I see it for five minutes, and it’s gone.
What we have been calling for here — we published a paper about this today, which I can send on to the committee — is that we need to have a marketing database for all gambling brands that are licensed where they store all their gambling ads. Otherwise, we have no control who they target, how they target them and what they use in advertising. I think that is really important moving forward.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much for that. This makes the problem even more complicated.
This was a fascinating hour. Thank you so much. Mr. Sampson, I want to wish you good luck with your children. Mine are older, and we didn’t go through that. I’m just really happy you could come here and explain how you got involved. Mr. Hill, thank you very much. Mr. Rossi, you are probably very tired. Please go back to bed. Thank you for having indulged us. You were very bright and very sharp, even though it’s the middle of the night. Thank you all.
(The committee adjourned.)