With a year of competition in Ontario under their belts, operators of online sports betting sites are hopeful other Canadian provinces follow suit in year two.
Last April, Ontario sports betting went from a single legal operator to more than a dozen after the province launched a competitive market for internet gambling. There are now more than 70 gaming sites available in Ontario that offer legal sports betting, casino gaming, and poker.
However, no other province in Canada has introduced a similar system. Rather, most of Ontario’s peers have opted to stick with a legal monopoly for their government-owned lottery and gaming corporations.
Operators have been content in Ontario, as it is Canada’s most populous province and a market in which companies can open both online sportsbooks and casinos. Still, there was optimism voiced at a Canadian Gaming Association event on Tuesday, the first anniversary of Ontario launching its iGaming market, that other provinces will open up.
“Twelve months from now I don't see any reason, based on the great work that Ontario has done, that we can't see one, if not more, jurisdictions in Canada following their lead,” said Benjie Levy, head of PENN Interactive and president and chief operating officer of theScore.
There is a “broader Canadian imperative” to what operators are doing, according to Scott Vanderwel, the chief executive officer of PointsBet Canada.
Vanderwel said many Canadians are still betting with offshore sites that might be regulated abroad but not by provincial authorities. That means local governments are not receiving any financial proceeds from that wagering and that players are not protected by the same sort of regulatory standards as Ontario.
“I think maintaining the Canadian lens is a pretty important part of how we get this right for all Canadians,” Vanderwel said.
'We want to keep going'
It’s hard to argue Ontario’s iGaming model hasn’t worked from a customer-acquisition and revenue standpoint. According to iGaming Ontario, the government agency legally responsible for the regulated market, approximately $1.4 billion in total gaming revenue was generated from more than 1.6 million active player accounts in the first year of the regulatory framework.
There’s a good chance other provinces have been monitoring Ontario’s experiment, even if they’re not conducting their own. At any rate, if other provincial governments are not paying attention, Ontario’s chief law officer may soon alert them to the potential of a competitive iGaming market. If that happens, sports bettors in other parts of Canada could find themselves with a lot of regulated wagering options, instead of only a few legal operators and a host of “grey market” sites.
“We want to keep going,” Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey said during Tuesday’s anniversary event. “I have colleagues across the country in positions to make decisions, [I’m] interested in connecting with them. We want to explain to them what a wonderful opportunity this is for their province.”
Do the right thing
That said, there is some tidying up that needs to be done in Ontario, which both regulators and operators admit. The burst of advertising that heralded the launch of the competitive iGaming market was an annoyance to some and alarming to others, especially those worried about increased gambling addiction.
There was support on Tuesday for a more relaxed approach by operators. Levy noted that Belgium recently announced a crackdown on gambling advertising driven in part by the volume of ads people were seeing.
“We have this tremendous opportunity that's in front of all of us, if we all do the right thing, but it relies on us all doing the right thing and focusing on the consumer and focusing on the long-term potential of this market,” Levy said.
Owning... stuff
Dale Hooper, general manager at FanDuel Canada, said operators “need to own our shit.”
Hooper said the industry needs to get out in front of any issues heading its way and that companies within the sector need to understand their roles.
“To make this long-term sustainable, we need to do things right,” he added. “And we need to, at some point, not take this as a gold rush and to understand that there's more money to be made in year 10 than in year one.”
There are also more technical issues that need sorting. Vanderwel pointed to horse racing and poker, which have been hindered by Canadian law and provincial regulations. The former cannot be offered by online sportsbooks in the province — you can only bet the ponies at tracks, OTBs, and separate apps — while the latter is struggling with a rule that requires all poker players to be in Ontario.
“There are places where we can't just pause and stop,” Vanderwel said. “We've gone through our startup year, we're now getting into the next set of years, where it's incumbent on us to… make it more inclusive, to make sure that the pieces that we couldn't get to out of the gate that we do get to and that we incorporate them with equity, and that we allow all aspects of this industry to be kind of governed and regulated in a framework that makes sense to all players.”
