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Gambling has long been a popular pastime in Canada. In fact, Indigenous peoples enjoyed stick gambling and dice games long before John Cabot’s voyage to Canada — back in 1497 — ever happened. However, the gambling games that were popular back then are now just part of cultural history as they gave way to playing cards and other structured forms of betting.
Today, Canada’s gambling industry is not just strong — it’s at record levels.
According to the Canadian Gaming Association, the gaming industry was worth CA$15 billion as of January 2026. Not only that, it contributes up to CA$9 billion annually to fund government, alongside community programs and services.
These numbers are the highest they’ve been since 1969, when sweeping changes to the Criminal Code of Canada gave provinces the authority to license and regulate gambling independently within their borders, leading to dozens of Canadian online casinos and sportsbooks launching. But even as revenue soars, a curious pattern is emerging: player numbers and financial activity seem to be moving in different directions.
Gambling Market Growth Usually Means More Players
There’s a basic rule analysts use to explain growth in almost any market: revenue can only rise two ways: with more customers buying in or existing customers spending more.
It’s not just a rule of thumb:
- Business analysts typically break down revenue growth into two components: customer acquisition and average spend per customer
- In healthy, expanding markets, that growth usually comes from both: more people trying the product and existing users spending a bit more
Translation: when an industry is growing at the rate Canada’s gambling market is, the expectation is that both sides of that equation are moving up together. New players are coming in, and current ones are spending more.
But that’s not quite what the data shows.
Here’s Canada’s Gambling Paradox
The share of Canadians who gamble has actually been shrinking.
The 2002 Statistics Canada report revealed roughly 76% of Canadians (18.9 million) aged 15 and older gambled in the past year. But by 2018, that number had dropped to 64.5%.
More importantly, the decline wasn’t even across age groups. Over 72% of those aged 45-64 were the most likely to have gambled, while 44% of those aged 15-24 were the least likely. This suggests the drop in overall participation is disproportionately being driven by younger Canadians opting out.
On paper, a shrinking participation rate implies a market losing ground. In practice, the opposite has happened.
Sportsbooks now sponsor NHL and NBA teams. Betting odds run across the bottom of live broadcasts. Provincial regulators are reporting billions in annual wagers through legal online platforms that barely existed a few years ago.
So how does an industry pull in record revenue while a shrinking, and increasingly older, share of the population takes part?
The short answer: growth isn’t coming from new gamblers. It’s coming from how much the existing ones are spending and where that spending is happening.
Most of Canada’s iGaming Action Happens in Ontario
Canada’s biggest gambling market is exactly where you’d expect to find it.
Ontario opened its regulated iGaming market on April 4, 2022 and it hasn’t slowed down since. In year one alone, the province processed roughly CA$35.6 billion in total wagers, generating about CA$1.4 billion in gaming revenue. That was enough to put Ontario among the top five iGaming jurisdictions in North America — a remarkable feat for a market that had only just gone legal.
The growth didn’t stop there. By 2024–25, total wagers had more than doubled to CA$82.7 billion. Revenue climbed to CA$2.9 billion over the same period. Four years in and it’s clear Ontario isn’t just competing with the biggest gambling markets on the continent. Rather, it’s setting the pace.
More of interest, however, is that fewer Canadians gamble today than they did two decades ago. So the growth in Ontario isn’t coming from new players. It’s coming from the ones already there. The province’s latest annual report counted roughly 2.6 million active player accounts in a province of about 15 million residents. Revenue is climbing faster than the player base, and that gap is the real story.
Commenting on the visible shift in player behavior, Tonybet CEO Dmitry Arabuli said:
“Since regulation launched in Ontario, the player landscape has changed significantly as many of the largest North American operators entered the market. Competition increased, with the focus shifting from chasing large volumes of casual participants to building stronger relationships with more informed and engaged players. These players tend to interact more frequently with betting products and show stronger loyalty to the platforms they trust.”
“Regulation also drew a clearer line between grey-market operators and licensed platforms. Many players who were previously using offshore sites have migrated towards regulated products. This did not necessarily expand the total number of gamblers, but it redirected an existing player base into the licensed ecosystem.”
Alberta’s New iGaming Market Could See a Similar Trend
Alberta’s regulated iGaming market is barely off the ground. The province went live on July 13, 2026, becoming the second Canadian jurisdiction — after Ontario — to open its doors to private operators. Twenty-two operator sites launched on day one, with roughly 50 more registered and expected to follow before the transition window closes in October.
Although there’s no revenue data or player-behavior numbers to pick apart yet, Ontario’s blueprint is worth paying attention to.
Alberta didn’t design its framework from scratch. It borrowed heavily from Ontario’s — same dual-track structure, same registration-then-commercial-agreement process, same emphasis on pulling grey-market players into a licensed system. So, if Alberta’s rollout mirrors Ontario’s playbook that closely, there’s a reasonable case its early growth curve will too.
Here’s what that could look like, based on how Ontario’s market unfolded back in 2022:
- An early wave of grey-market migration. Ontario’s channelization rate — the share of players using licensed sites over offshore ones — sat around 90% as of May 2026. Even though it took a few years to pull the bulk of players into Ontario’s regulated system, Alberta is likely to see the same gradual migration.
- A crowded field competing for the same players, not new ones. With roughly 50 operators registered before launch, Alberta’s market is arriving more saturated than Ontario’s was in 2022. That kind of competition tends to accelerate the shift from acquisition to retention — operators fighting over engaged players rather than racing to sign up casual ones.
- Revenue growth outpacing player growth. If Ontario’s pattern holds, expect early headlines to focus on total wagers and revenue milestones, while the actual number of active accounts grows far more slowly in comparison.
None of this is guaranteed, however. Alberta’s population, income distribution, and existing gambling habits aren’t identical to Ontario’s, and four years of hindsight makes it easy to assume history repeats itself neatly. But the truth is that it rarely does.
Nonetheless, the early structural signals — a regulated market that heavily mirrors Ontario, a market entering already crowded, and a grey-market base waiting to be converted — point toward the same story eventually playing out: growth driven less by new players walking in the door, and more by how hard operators work to keep the ones already there.
What Comes Next for Canada’s Gambling Industry?
Two provinces down. Several still watching from the sidelines.
Ontario proved a regulated market can work. Alberta just bet that the same model will work again. What happens next depends less on whether other provinces follow — most are already watching closely — and more on what the industry does with its active players.
The existing pattern is that although fewer Canadians gamble today than they did in the past, the money flowing through regulated platforms keeps growing. That’s not a contradiction. It’s a shift in where the industry’s attention has gone — from competing for new signups to keeping the existing ones engaged, loyal, and spending more per visit.
Expect that shift to define the next phase of Canadian iGaming. As more provinces open their own regulated markets, each one will likely repeat a version of what Ontario already went through. Alberta is the first real test of that pattern outside Ontario, and it definitely won’t be the last.
