If you have placed a bet on a regulated Ontario site since April 2022, you were part of an experiment the province itself decided not to tell you about.
That is the upshot of a Toronto Star investigation by reporter Brendan Kennedy, which found that iGaming Ontario, the Crown agency that runs the province’s legal online casino and sports betting market, commissioned a two-year study on problem gambling and then quietly buried it after the early results came back worse than expected.
Living and betting in this province, you get used to the ads, the odds boosts, the constant churn of new operators going live. What does not usually make the news is what happens behind the scenes at the agency overseeing all of it. That is exactly why this story matters here. I write for the people actually using these sites, not for anyone just passing through the industry, and this is the kind of story neighbors deserve to know about even when it is uncomfortable.
The study was commissioned in the months before Ontario’s regulated market launched in April 2022. It was meant to be longitudinal, tracking the same group of participants across three waves, starting with a baseline survey in February 2022, two months before launch. The contract went to the Responsible Gambling Council, the charity that also runs the responsible gambling accreditation program every operator in Ontario must complete.
According to internal records the Star obtained through freedom of information requests, agency executives grew uneasy once researchers reported problem gambling rates higher than they had expected. From there, the paper trail shows a shift from planning to publish the research to planning how to manage it.
A February 2023 email from iGaming Ontario’s Melissa Ball mentioned seeking legal advice over whether the researchers might hold copies of the data themselves. Later that year, the agency brought in a firm called Counsel Public Affairs for what internal notes described as strategic planning and reactive messaging. Notes from a meeting with that firm reportedly raised the question of whether there was a gag order in place, and suggested that if researchers got the data back, they might not speak critically of the agency.
By January 2025, notes indicate the agency had decided the previous September to stop funding further work on the report and not release it, saying feedback given over several meetings had never been fully incorporated.
As recently as 2024, iGaming Ontario had told the Star it intended to make the results public. In an unsigned statement responding to the investigation, the agency said Ontario’s market has some of the strictest standards in the country and pointed to continued work with partners on responsible gambling. It also said the study did not meet the standard needed to inform policy.
The Responsible Gambling Council said the findings belong to iGaming Ontario under the terms of the contract, and that the decision on publishing rests with the agency. Former council CEO Shelley White, who now sits on iGaming Ontario’s board, would not answer the Star’s questions, and current CEO Sarah McCarthy declined to be interviewed.
The Ontario NDP has called for release of the full study, all three waves of data, a reported final draft from August 2024, and the records that were withheld, along with details and cost of the public relations contract. The party said the agency cited upcoming election considerations when deciding to hold the report back.
What it means for residents
The numbers underline why this matters. Ontarians wagered more than $82.7 billion online in the 2024-25 fiscal year, and regulated sites handled $9.46 billion in June 2026 alone, up 30.3 percent from the year before. Meanwhile, Ontario’s chief coroner has tracked a rise in suicides linked to gambling problems, a doubling of emergency department visits for gambling disorders, and insolvencies tied in part to gambling more than tripling. The Star found no public study has ever examined how the legalization of online gambling and its advertising actually changed problem gambling rates here.
iGaming Ontario oversees the competitive market of private operators, while the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario sets and enforces standards. In May, the AGCO released a separate Ipsos study, commissioned with iGaming Ontario, finding that 91.1 percent of Ontarians who gambled online in the prior three months used a regulated site.
If you are worried about your own play, the province launched BetGuard on May 14, a centralized self-exclusion tool that lets residents shut themselves out of every regulated Ontario casino and betting site at once, for set periods of time.
