10/21/2026
Toronto Star Editorial:
A Star report Friday by investigative journalist Brendan Kennedy has raised extremely troubling questions that must be urgently addressed by the Ford government.
It is appalling that a report showing problem gambling in Ontario to be significantly higher than expected was shelved by a provincial agency and that "gag orders" were considered to prevent leaks.
Kennedy reported that internal records obtained by the Star show iGaming Ontario, the government agency responsible for online gaming, secretly shelved a research study commissioned in 2022, when the online market for sports betting and casino games was launched, to track rates of problem gambling in the province.
Online gambling is hugely lucrative. As Kennedy reported, Ontarians wagered more than $82.7 billion in 2024-25, with $3 billion going to provincial coffers. Preliminary data from 2025-26 and the first quarter of 2026-27 shows a 25-per-cent increase on those numbers.
But gambling is also fraught. And the province had been warned, both by the experience in Britain and Europe, and by myriad mental health and social agencies, of the perilous box it was opening with its gambling plans. It had a responsibility to inform the public of what it knew of the risks associated with this industry — and chose to obscure them instead.
That the legalization of sports gambling had created health consequences — with suicides, ER visits, insolvencies attributed to gambling and with calls to problem gambling lines increasing — should hardly have been a surprise.
Offerings of the online betting smorgasbord — aggressively advertised in campaigns targeted at young people, especially at young males — are designed to exploit the brain's habit-forming neurological mechanisms.
Once reward circuits are primed with a craving for gambling's buzz, modern technology makes transactions essentially "frictionless," with almost no time or space between the impulse and the bet.
The gambler needn't even travel to the OTB to wager, or to the corner store for lottery tickets. Bets can be instantly and furtively placed from the dinner table.
The consequences are compounding. With bank accounts drained, problem gamblers are often drawn into criminality to support the habit, or to becoming indebted to people it is not a good idea to owe money to.
Those admonitions to bet responsibly contained in gambling ads are risible.
The addicted are by definition hardly able to. And the elements of in-game bets have been broken down to such ludicrous specifics — will the next pitch be a ball or strike? how many three-pointers will Steph Curry hit? — that the very notion of moderation is an insult.
What the ads and the invitations essentially say is: Bet now, bet often. Bet on everything, all the time.
For the Ford government, the political fallout of this scandal could be highly damaging. Profit and political considerations have been put ahead of the health and well-being of Ontario citizens.
As always, the attempted coverup only makes it worse. But such an outrage is hardly new for this PC government — which has too often demonstrated a propensity for secrecy and clamped down on media and public ability to monitor and hold the premier and his people to account.
What Kennedy received by way of documents were heavily censored. All findings from the research report were withheld. To get even that required a successful appeal to the Information and Privacy Commissioner.
It's telling that iGaming Ontario had hired a public relations firm in 2023 for "strategic planning and reaction messaging support" related to the gaming research study.
It screams volumes that the Star's efforts to seek comment from iGaming Ontario received no response.
The study should be released immediately.
The premier must explain and account for the iGaming Ontario scandal.
