Paul Tuns:

Cardus, an Ottawa and Hamilton-based Christian think tank, released a pair of studies in September exploring the scope and impact of sports betting, and calling for tighter regulations of the online sports-betting market.

In “Hidden Harms of Single-Event Sports Betting in Ontario,” author Johanna Lewis found that the average net monthly spending per sports betting account is $283, the equivalent of three per cent of the average monthly household income. (A person may have more than one account.) The report states that experts consider gambling more than one per cent of income to be associated with higher risk of harm to finance, relationships, and psychological and physical health.

The report notes that research shows that a person who spends more than one per cent of their income on gambling is 4.3 times as likely to experience financial harm as someone who spends less than 0.1 per cent of their income gambling, “4.7 times as likely to experience relational harm, 3.9 times as likely to experience emotional or psychological harm, and 4.4 times as likely to experience harm from health problems related to their gambling.”

The one per cent threshold for average household income in Ontario would be $89 per month. Research suggests that the three per cent threshold presents even higher risks of harms.

These higher levels of betting should not be surprising considering the ubiquity of sports-betting advertising and sports commentary. The report cited another study that found sports viewers in Ontario are exposed to 2.8 gambling references every minute during live sports broadcasts and that “more than one fifth (21.6 per cent) of viewing time included some form of gambling reference.”

Brian Dijkema, president of Cardus, said, “Single-event sports betting has become so big in Ontario, it can turn anyone’s smartphone into a two-hour slot machine while watching a hockey or football game.” Dikjkema called on government “to regain control of this form of gambling before the situation gets worse.”

The report said online sports betting “opened the door for any game to turn a smartphone into a two-hour slot machine” and in doing so made the worst features easily accessible: the “ability to bet quickly, continuously, and at short intervals,” with “effectively unlimited access (online), and ability to gamble while alone, drunk, or high” and “structural characteristics that encourage cognitive distortions and loss chasing.” Furthermore, online betting enables problem gamblers “to circumvent responsible-gambling tools.”

The report also calls out “the rise of in-play betting” which allows betting while games are underway on any number of items like who scores next or who leads at halftime. Online sports betting allows gambling sites to change their odds in real time during games and to offer “bets on a virtually infinite number of events through apps and websites that are updated every few seconds.” The report states, “As one researcher put it, the introduction of in-play bets has changed sports betting from a game like the lottery—make your predictions, then sit back and wait to see if you won—to a game more like a slot machine, where you can bet continuously throughout the game.” That is, they enable frequent betting and opportunities for greater financial losses. “For sportsbooks,” the Cardus study observes, “getting people to spend more money by betting more often and more quickly is a feature, not a bug.”

The report said that compared to traditional sports betting, in-play bettors tend to be younger and more likely to be consuming alcohol while betting.

Sports betting and its advertising “normalizes as fun and harmless what is in fact a risky and potentially addictive behaviour.” Thus, the Cardus report finds, “the rise of online sports betting is a public-health problem that demands action from government.”

Considering the ease and addictive nature of online gambling, Cardus found the number of active accounts with iGO, the online sports betting regulator of the province of Ontario, has increased rapidly as has the amount being wagered. In fiscal year 2023, covering the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, $7 billion was wagered in online sports betting in Ontario. Early estimates for fiscal year 2024 indicated that the amount bet was increased to $9 billion.

The number of licensed sports betting sites has grown from 18 in early 2023 to 47 today.

Basketball is the most popular sport to be betted on (29 per cent), followed by soccer (15), football (13), hockey (nine) and baseball (8), with all other sports combining for 26 per cent of sports betting.

The “Hidden Harms” report urges the Ontario government to ban advertisements for sports betting, ban in-game betting, require more effective responsible-gambling messages, provide a central platform for players to limit their sports gambling, and require companies that profit from sports gambling to contribute finances to problem-gambling prevention and treatment.

While advocates of single-game and prop bet gambling say that legal gambling reduces illegal gambling, the report notes there is no credible estimate for Canada’s black market sports betting and thus governments and companies have no idea what effect legalization has had on sports gambling. In Cardus’s second study, “How Big is Canada’s Black Market for Sports Betting,” also written by Lewis, said that the most common public estimate is $10 billion based on a 25-year-old extrapolation from United States gambling figures.

Lewis said the claims that there is a set pot of betting that would be merely transferred to government-regulated sites online are betrayed by the “hundreds of millions of dollars” companies spend “trying to stoke demand through advertising.”

Lewis also found that estimates of government’s share are exaggerated or misleading considering that the billions being wagered do not take into account paying out winnings.

The Cardus study says that Ontario, the only province with detailed public information, is hardly reaping the fiscal rewards of legal sports betting. In Ontario in 2022-2023, the provincial government’s agency iGO made $74 million while private companies netted a profit of $294 million.

Dijkema said, “Single-event sports betting has been great for private companies, but not for the public purse and may not have actually helped reduce under-the-table sports betting anyway.”