Alberta’s service and red tape reduction minister, Dale Nally, pushed back after the chair of British Columbia’s lottery corporation criticised the province’s new private iGaming model and warned about foreign ownership in the market. Nally called the comments disingenuous and said Alberta had chosen regulation to bring online gambling into a supervised system with player protections and addiction treatment.
The criticism came from Greg Moore, who chairs the British Columbia Lottery Corporation, the Crown corporation responsible for gambling in British Columbia under the Gaming Control Act. According to Casino.org, Moore posted a series of comments on social media arguing that Alberta’s private model could allow foreign owners to dominate the market and send a significant share of gambling profits out of the country.
Moore also said the system had led to a “massive proliferation of online gambling”, with multinational operators competing for customers while prioritising shareholder returns. His analysis, as reported by the outlet, said that after Alberta’s iGaming market went live on 13 July, 32 private operator groups had registered or entered the market, but only 16% were clearly Canadian-owned and controlled.
More than 80% of those operator groups were foreign-owned or jointly foreign-owned, according to the same analysis, and at least seven were controlled by U.S. parent companies. Moore named DraftKings, Caesars Entertainment and PENN Entertainment as American-controlled companies and wrote that Alberta’s framework, while competitive on its face, could end up shifting gambling revenue, profits, data and economic value to foreign corporations.
Nally rejected that argument. He said online gambling was already widely available and that, in Alberta, an estimated 70% of activity had been taking place through unregulated operators with little or no player protection or social responsibility standards.
He argued that Alberta created a regulated system to pull that activity into a framework with player safeguards. Nally said the province was putting player safety and social responsibility first, with publicly funded addiction treatment available to Albertans who struggle with gambling.
The broader market opened on 13 July, when Alberta’s regulated iGaming system went live and private sports betting and online casino companies began entering the province. Global News reported that nearly 50 companies had paid $200,000 in registration and permit fees before launch, though Nally said he thought closer to 20 were ready for customers.
The province said its new system would take 20% of each company’s revenue, and the government forecast a $76 million lift to provincial coffers in the first year. Global News also reported that Alberta had 29 iGaming sites accepting wagers on the Alberta iGaming Corporation’s site, while an AGLC spokesperson said that “all systems are a go” at midnight.
Helene Fortin, the former chair of Loto-Québec, also criticised Moore’s intervention. She said she was surprised by the comments and argued that provincial governments set public policy while lottery corporations execute the mandates they are given.
Fortin said Alberta’s framework did not create online gambling from scratch but brought existing activity into a system with consumer protections, responsible gaming standards and regulatory oversight. She added that reasonable people can disagree on public policy, but debates should be grounded in facts.
