The Canadian Gaming Association’s president and chief executive, Paul Burns, has warned that iGaming Ontario’s decision not to publish a pre-launch study of problem-gambling rates could weaken confidence in a regulated market that depends on transparency.
Burns said the sector needed public, evidence-based research and trustworthy data on gambling, harm and player behaviour in Ontario. “We shouldn’t be wanting to move to hide things,” he said. “It doesn’t do us any good.”
The dispute followed a Toronto Star investigation that found iGaming Ontario had shelved a study it commissioned from the Responsible Gambling Council before Ontario opened its regulated online-gambling market in April 2022. The study had been intended to establish a baseline for problem gambling and help tailor the agency’s responsible-gambling programme.
The research was designed as a two-year longitudinal study, following the same participants through three waves of data collection. Its first wave took place in February 2022, two months before the market launch.
Internal meeting notes said the baseline produced problem-gambling rates that differed significantly from other research. Officials considered adding a telephone sample for the second wave because they believed the methodology might have affected the findings.
iGaming Ontario officials also discussed limiting circulation of the initial findings and considered potential measures to manage criticism from researchers. In December 2022, senior manager Melissa Ball told a colleague not to share the baseline results widely because of internal discussion around them.
Researchers Iris Balodis and Michael Wohl said their participation had been conditional on publication of the study’s findings. They later parted ways with the Responsible Gambling Council and iGaming Ontario after disagreeing over the appropriate next steps following the first data wave.
The study continued until a final draft was delivered in August 2024. The following month, iGaming Ontario decided to halt further work and not release it, after concluding that feedback had not been fully incorporated and that methodological concerns meant it did not meet the standard required for policy development.
A freedom-of-information request identified more than 1,750 pages of potentially relevant material. The released records were heavily redacted, while hundreds of pages were withheld. iGaming Ontario said disclosure of some records could harm Ontario’s economic interests.
The controversy comes as Ontario’s online market continues to grow. More than $82.7 billion was wagered in the 2024-25 fiscal year, with nearly $3 billion flowing to provincial coffers. Preliminary figures for 2025-26 and the first quarter of 2026-27 were more than 25% higher than those totals.
Gambling-related emergency-department visits in Ontario had doubled, insolvencies linked to gambling had more than tripled and calls to the provincial problem-gambling helpline had risen.
iGaming Ontario defended its safeguards, saying Ontario operates under some of North America’s strictest consumer-protection standards and that it had invested nearly $5 million in responsible-gaming initiatives and player supports in the preceding year. These included campus education and outreach, as well as BetGuard, the provincewide online self-exclusion service.
BetGuard allows Ontarians aged 19 and older to opt out of all regulated online-gaming platforms through one portal. People who enrol cannot access existing accounts, open new ones or receive marketing messages from regulated sites. As covered in our report this week, the tool has also featured in discussion of Ontario’s province-specific online-gambling framework.
The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario requires operators to monitor player behaviour, identify those at risk of harm and provide interventions proportionate to that risk. Operators must also assess the effects of those interventions and retain records of customer interactions, risk profiles and actions taken.
