At least 220 Canadians with gambling problems died by suicide in the past decade, according to a CBC News investigation that also found no Canadian coroner has ever held an inquest into a gambling-related death. The broadcaster found gambling-related suicides in Ontario had tripled after the province opened its private online betting market in 2022.
The national figure is likely an undercount. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Yukon and Nunavut do not track gambling-related deaths, while Canadian coroners generally do not examine whether problem gambling contributed to a suicide or routinely review financial records and online histories for signs of it. Gambling harm can also remain concealed from relatives and friends.
Canadian chief coroners pledged in 2003 to begin national tracking of gambling-related deaths, but that system was never established. In Ontario, the Office of the Chief Coroner recorded an average of five gambling-related suicides a year between 2016 and 2021, before the subsequent tripling.
As we reported in October, nearly 130,000 Ontarians now show signs of problem gambling. Ontario’s online gambling market is worth about $3 billion a year, and the provincial government said it had invested $421 million since 2018 in responsible-gambling education, research and addiction treatment, including $70.1 million in the latest year cited.
The absence of Canadian inquests contrasts with approaches in Australia and the United Kingdom. The U.K. has held seven gambling-related inquests since the 2022 inquiry into Jack Ritchie’s death, producing recommendations for government and industry. Such proceedings can examine player-account data and banking records to identify gambling behaviour and whether operators failed to intervene.
A recent Victorian Coroners Court finding illustrates the scope of evidence an inquest can consider. Kyle Hudson opened a Sportsbet account on his 18th birthday in 2017 and four other major betting accounts in 2018. Over a little more than four years, the court found, he placed 8,585 bets worth about A$895,700 and recorded a net loss of almost A$48,000.
CBC reported that Coroner Paul Lowrie concluded Sportsbet should have detected Hudson’s problem gambling. Hudson’s activity triggered 37 alerts in the operator’s internal safer-gambling monitoring system. Lowrie wrote that the case showed the human cost of online gambling and warned against leaving monitoring and intervention solely to betting companies.
The difficulty of identifying cases is not confined to Canada. A Victorian study found 184 direct gambling-related suicides and 17 involving people affected by another person’s gambling among 4,788 suicides recorded between 2009 and 2016. The researchers said those cases, representing 4.2% of all suicides, were probably an underestimate because gambling is not routinely investigated and may be hidden from families, friends and health professionals.
