Online casinos in Canada: how Ontario's regulated market works

How online casinos are regulated in Canada

There is no single national online casino regulator in Canada. Gambling runs on a split between federal criminal law, which prohibits most gambling by default, and provincial regulation, which supplies the exceptions. Section 207 of the Criminal Code lets a lottery scheme, read to include online casino gaming, operate only where a province conducts and manages it.

That is why the legality of an online casino in Canada is really a provincial question. Historically every province met the requirement by running a single government site. Ontario broke from that by building an open market in which many private operators compete, while the province still formally conducts and manages the activity through a dedicated body. Alberta became the second province to copy the approach in July 2026.

The iGaming Ontario model

Ontario launched its market on 4 April 2022. The structure separates two jobs. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario is the regulator, setting and enforcing the standards operators must meet. iGaming Ontario, a subsidiary of the AGCO, is the conduct-and-manage entity that holds the commercial relationship with operators, the arrangement that keeps the market within section 207.

To offer online casino or sports betting in the province lawfully, an operator has to be registered with the AGCO and hold an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. That combination is what turns an offshore-style brand into a regulated Ontario one, subject to Canadian oversight, standards and taxation rather than a foreign licence alone.

The design was deliberate. Rather than compete with a single state monopoly, Ontario opened the door to the many private brands Canadians were already using through offshore sites, on the condition that they come inside the regulated perimeter. The aim was to move existing play onto sites a regulator can see and police.

What the market looks like now

The market has grown quickly. In its first quarter, from launch on 4 April 2022 to the end of June 2022, the market saw about C$4.08 billion wagered through 18 operators running 31 sites, with roughly 492,000 active player accounts. Three years on, in June 2025, Ontario's regulated operators took C$7.26 billion in wagers in a single month, up 21.4% on June 2024, and generated C$306.8 million in gross gaming revenue across more than 50 operators and 80-plus sites.

The player base has widened in step. There were about 1.01 million active player accounts across the regulated platforms in June 2025, a 20.9% rise on the roughly 838,000 a year earlier. Since the market opened in April 2022, Ontarians have wagered more than C$204 billion, producing over C$8 billion in operator revenue and more than C$1.6 billion in tax for the province.

Online casino, rather than sports betting, does most of the heavy lifting in those totals, mirroring a pattern regulators see in mature markets: fast, always-available casino products draw the largest share of spend. The scale is the clearest sign the model achieved its first goal, pulling a large volume of play that had been offshore onto licensed sites.

Player protections and provinces without an open market

Coming inside the regulated market means accepting rules built around player protection. Operators must meet the AGCO's Registrar's Standards, which cover responsible-gambling tools, self-exclusion, deposit and time controls, age and identity verification, and routes for complaints, safeguards that an offshore site is under no obligation to provide. The AGCO has also tightened advertising, barring professional athletes from iGaming ads and restricting celebrities likely to appeal to minors, effective 28 February 2024.

Most of Canada still looks different. Outside Ontario and Alberta, each province offers online casino play through a single government-run site, such as British Columbia's PlayNow or Loto-Quebec's platform. Those sites are legal and regulated, but they are monopolies rather than open markets, so players face one provincial operator rather than dozens of competing licensed brands.

Alberta's July 2026 launch, using a regulator plus a conduct-and-manage corporation in the same way as Ontario, suggests the open-market model is the one other provinces are most likely to study next. Alberta's own iGaming strategy put a number on the problem it was trying to fix, estimating that unregulated offshore operators had been capturing around 70% of the province's online gambling before the regulated market opened, the same offshore leakage Ontario built its market to reverse.

Our take

Ontario's experiment has largely done what it set out to do. It took a grey market that Canadians were already using and made a large part of it answerable to a regulator, with player protections, tax and enforcement attached. The revenue figures show the demand was always there; the achievement was channelling it onto licensed sites.

The measure that matters most is channelisation, the share of total play that happens on licensed rather than offshore sites, and it is the yardstick regulators in both provinces will be judged on. High wagering totals are only a success if they represent activity pulled back from unregulated operators rather than new harm created; the AGCO has commissioned independent research to track exactly that.

The open question is how far the model travels. Alberta has adopted it, but the rest of Canada still runs single-site monopolies, and the choice between an open market and a government monopoly is as much political as it is technical. For players, the practical point is that a legal online casino in Canada is defined by the province: in Ontario and Alberta it means a licensed operator on the regulator's list, and elsewhere it means the one official provincial site. Anything else is offshore, and outside the protections this market was built to provide.