Canada is now the world’s third-largest online gambling market, worth an estimated CA$3.15 billion in 2025, yet it still has no national self-exclusion register and no national licensing framework. New research from CasinoCanada.com finds that a player who self-excludes in one province can keep gambling offshore, or simply cross a provincial border and carry on.
The analysis draws on iGaming Ontario figures, provincial regulatory data, Blask’s 2025 iGaming Landscape Report and peer-reviewed public health research. It traces the gap to Canada’s constitutional structure, which hands gambling to the provinces and leaves Ottawa without a national regulator. The result is ten parallel regimes that do not connect to one another.
Ten regimes, no shared register
Self-exclusion in Canada stops at the provincial line. A person who signs up to block their own access in one jurisdiction is not blocked in the other nine, and is not blocked on the offshore sites that operate outside the licensed system entirely. There is no single database, as there is in several other regulated markets, that applies one registration across every operator a player can reach.
That matters because the unlicensed market is large and growing. Outside Ontario, estimated offshore leakage ranges from 49% of play in British Columbia to 93% in Saskatchewan, with Alberta and Manitoba both at 88%. Offshore platforms grew 40% year-on-year in 2025, nearly double the 23% growth recorded by licensed operators over the same period.
Helpline contacts up 198%
The player protection stakes are set out in a January 2026 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. It found that gambling-related contacts to Ontario’s ConnexOntario helpline rose an estimated 198% after the province opened its regulated market in 2022. The increase was concentrated almost entirely among boys and men aged 15 to 44.
Ontario is the country’s regulatory success story, and the research does not dispute that. Channelisation, the share of play captured by licensed operators, stands at 91.1%. The province’s new BetGuard self-exclusion tool drew more than 500 registrations in its first two weeks. But those registrations sit against 1.235 million active player accounts, and BetGuard stops at the Ontario border like every other provincial tool.
A commercial case, not only a moral one
CasinoCanada frames the missing register as a competitiveness problem as much as a harm problem. The international tools that operators point to as models all share one feature: a single registration that covers the entire market.
Eugene Ravdin, Head of PR at CasinoCanada, said record wagering and rising helpline demand are happening at once.
“Record wagers and a near-200 per cent rise in helpline contacts are happening at the same time, which tells you market growth and player protection are not the same thing. The tools that work internationally, GAMSTOP, Spelpaus, BetStop, all cover the whole market under a single registration.”
“Canada has nothing like it. A national register wouldn’t just protect players, it would also help licensed operators compete against offshore sites. This is a commercial argument as much as a moral one.”
The tools Ravdin names show the template. GAMSTOP covers licensed operators across Britain, Sweden’s Spelpaus runs through the Spelinspektionen licensing system, and Australia’s BetStop operates as a national register for licensed wagering providers. Each depends on a national licensing layer that Canada does not have.
What would have to change
A national register in Canada would require either a federal regulator or coordination between provinces that currently license and supervise gambling on their own terms. Neither exists today, and the constitutional division of powers makes a top-down solution difficult. Provincial launches are still moving in the other direction toward more separate regimes, with Alberta opening its commercial iGaming market this week. Until the provinces connect their systems or a national layer is built above them, a Canadian who self-excludes will remain excluded in one place and free to play everywhere else.
Source: CasinoCanada.com
