Key Points
- John Lohr says that the government is talking about expanding Nova Scotia’s online gambling market, but at the moment, they haven’t made any decision.
- The emergency room stats for problem gamblers in Ontario have basically doubled since private operators have been allowed in.
- Alberta’s first quarter shows some pretty rapid growth, but the regulator there warns that these figures are still pretty preliminary.
Nova Scotia’s finance minister is admitting the obvious, that the province’s got no real grip on online betting outside of its own regulated system. John Lohr said as much last week: “we have any handle on it at all” when people from the province go and place bets online using offshore websites.
This comes at a time when Nova Scotia is trying to work out what its online gambling market should look like. Ontario and Alberta have already gone down the path of opening up to private operators, and the early results are a mixed bag. The revenue numbers show just how fast these things can grow, but the hospital records from Ontario show an increase in people coming in with gambling-related problems.
Halifax Considers Expansion But Still Not Sure What to Do
Nova Scotia does have one online gambling site, run by the Atlantic Lottery Corporation. Lohr is getting a bit worried about the websites that operate outside the province’s system, because they can’t properly keep an eye on them, or control what they get up to. He’s also got concerns about the health impact of people getting hooked on online gambling, and about betting ads that kids are seeing.
Then there’s the fact that people in Nova Scotia who use offshore or Ontario-regulated betting sites might end up taking tax revenue away from the province.
Lohr has stressed that the government isn’t committed to doing anything, yet.
Opposition leaders are urging the government to be careful. NDP leader Claudia Chender is saying they should be taking things one step at a time before getting more involved in online gambling. And interim Liberal leader Iain Rankin is saying they should do a public health risk assessment before they make any moves.
Alberta’s First Results Give us a Glimpse of Fast Growth, but the Numbers Need Some Context
Ontario opened up its online gambling market to private operators in April 2022, and then Alberta followed in their footsteps on July 13th 2026.
Within a few weeks, by early May, a total of 28 operators had either got the green light or were going through the licensing process in Alberta. But two big names, bet365 and 888, were conspicuous by their absence. The province had actually predicted that its regulated online gambling market would rake in around CA$100 million annually in tax revenue.
Of course, the launch of the market raised some red flags for First Nations casino groups who were worried that more online gambling would chip away at their land-based casino earnings.
Alberta went live with 15 operators a few days before the World Cup final, by September 30th that number had shot up to 24. The Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission’s first market report showed a neat CA$56.6 million in revenue for September.
Things were already looking up after the first two months. Operators were raking in CA43.3million in August, which is nearly double the CA22.2 million, the same as they made in July. But you’ve got to take into account that the July figure only covers the period after the market opened on July 13th, so it’s not a full month of activity.
So, in total, players placed a massive CA$1.28 billion in wagers with 388,585 active accounts. These are account figures, not individual player numbers, as one person can easily have multiple accounts.
Casino games accounted for 75.6% of the total revenue, while sports betting also started to pick up, jumping from CA5.2million to a tidy CA11.1 million.
Now, when you compare this to what Ontario was raking in, CA$416.3 million in September, Alberta’s figure is a respectable 14%. Which is a good starting point, but you’ve also got to bear in mind that Alberta was still getting its operators up and running, and the regulator is saying that these figures are still very preliminary.
Ontario was also still growing at the same time, their September wagers had reached CA$9.71 billion, an increase of 13.6%, and they had 1.41 million active accounts.
Alberta has also said how they plan to distribute the loot from the regulated market, the province gets to keep 20% of operators’ net revenue for public programs, 2% of gross gaming revenue goes to First Nations, and another 1% is ploughed back into research, prevention, education and treatment.
By the time the three-month transition period drew to a close on October 13th, 29 operators and 50 brands had received approval, Alberta’s Gaming Minister Dale Nally was already talking about sending cease and desist letters to any sites that weren’t playing by the rules and getting payment processors to shut off access to unlicensed sites.
But the big question is: how many players are actually switching from offshore websites to the licensed operators? Estimates vary wildly, SiGMA News said that offshore gambling was around 70% of the market before Alberta’s launch, and a Blask model put it at 88%. Blask also said that Stake, Roobet and Rainbet had never even bothered to apply for a licence in Alberta, and based on their player demand, those three brands accounted for about 36% of the market.
BetMGM’s chief financial officer Gary Deutsch said that about 20% of the company’s new sign-ups during the third quarter came from Alberta.
Hospital Records in Ontario Measure Health Consequences
The story does not end there with revenue figures. Ontario’s hospitals have another measure to demonstrate what occurred after private gambling firms came into the picture.
On 16 September, a paper showed that the number of patients with gambling disorders in the emergency department was about twice as high since Ontario expanded its online market.
The researchers identified 952 visits for 757 patients. More than three-quarters of those visits were male. At the end of the research period, visits for males aged 10 to 29 were 154% more than predicted.
Over 70% of visits had a diagnosis of additional mental conditions or drug abuse. Nearly one-third led to hospitalisations.
It means that there is a correlation between the market expansion and an increase in emergency visits. However, the researchers did not conclude that the market expansion caused the number of visits to increase. Moreover, they highlighted that there had been a growth in gambling-associated harm along with the market expansion.
Young people have shown similar results. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health conducted a study among 7th-12th grade students in 2025. The survey showed that 12% gambled online, while in 2023, only 8% did so.
Moreover, students bet on sports online. In 2019, only 1% of students bet on sports online, while in 2025 – 10% did.
Dr Peter Selby, from the centre, highlighted the danger of age-verification systems and the way sports celebrities and social media influencers promoted gambling.
New Brunswick is Weighing Up a More Restricted Change
Nova Scotia certainly isn’t the only Atlantic province that’s taking a look at how it runs online gambling, New Brunswick is doing the same and Finance Minister René Legacy says it’s looking at private operators, but the bill that was tabled in October is a more modest proposal.
What they’ve proposed is that the government should be able to set rules for online live casino games. This is coming from the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, the people who already run online gambling in New Brunswick and who brought the idea forward. We can expect more details on how this would all work later down the line.
Some people might think that this is a step towards opening New Brunswick’s market to private operators but that’s not really what’s going on here. This is about the government being able to set the rules for online live casino games.
Expert Analysis: Is Nova Scotia Getting it Wrong when it Comes to the Figures?
To our minds, Nova Scotia should be looking beyond the money when it considers expanding its market. Alberta’s revenue has gone up every month but what that really shows is who’s entered the market, and that’s not necessarily a measure of the level of harm that’s being caused. You have to look further down the line to really get a sense of things, and even then it’s not easy. In Ontario, for example, it took years for the hospital data to start showing up, and in Alberta their first report only covers 11 weeks.
The problem is that so far, we haven’t seen a plan from Nova Scotia for actually keeping an eye on all of this. They can’t even monitor offshore betting properly at the moment, so it’s going to be tough for them to figure out what impact opening up their market to more operators is going to have.
The Atlantic Lottery Corporation managed to return CA$164.5 million to Nova Scotia in 2025-26, and they reckon that they’re currently holding onto 35% of online gambling activity in the region. If they do open the market up to private operators then that’s going to put their income up against private companies, and private companies have been getting some pretty heavy criticism for the way they advertise.
People might say that Nova Scotia is missing out on potential tax revenue by holding back on this. And while that’s true, the Atlantic Lottery Corporation reckons that around CA$250 million is leaving Atlantic Canada every year through illegal gambling websites. But that figure is for the whole region, not just for Nova Scotia. We haven’t got a separate figure for Nova Scotia.
We’d still be in favour of taking the less drastic route proposed by Rankin, which would be to do a public health risk assessment before they make a decision on expanding the market. Nova Scotia really does need to see that evidence before they decide to change things up. And if they do decide to go with it, who’s going to be counting the cost in the province’s emergency departments down the line?
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